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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of paintings and collages being prepared by the Dedalus Foundation.
The Figure 4 on an Elegy is a beautiful example of Motherwell's celebrated Elegy series, combining aspects of Iberia with Elegy and other images. As Arnason remarked in his important book on Motherwell: "a freely-brushed, red-brown figure 4, set over the powerfully simple elegaic forms, is related to the triangles and diamonds of the Views and the Summertime in Italy series. The black cloud turns into, or is in the process of enveloping, the ovals and phallic verticals surrounded by splatter and drip in an orgiastic or orgasmic condition of frenzied actuality. The shapes overlap the picture edges on all four sides, creating the effect of a fragment in a state of metamorphous or dissolution" (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1977, p. 56)
H.H. Arnason describes Robert Motherwell's career as a drama of "classical" and "expressive" orders, the patrician and ragged. Indeed, Motherwell's art has always appeared balanced fitfully on the edge of conflict. How else to describe a painter capable of the intelligent and luxurious Open series and as tragic an utterance as the Spanish Elegy? It is the difference, say, between the carefree, uncanny life of Gauloises packets and the suffering of Goya. But the tension has sustained Motherwell's career and some of his best works, such as The Figure 4 on an Elegy.
Hand-selected by H.H. Arnason from the artist's Connecticut studio wall, The Figure 4 is a quintessential Motherwell. The Figure 4 contains the motifs of both the celebrated Spanish Elegy paintings and the Iberia series; in the right half of the work, the bruised, blot-like oval of Motherwell's Spanish Elegy is depicted, hanging like meat in a butcher's window, alongside the iconic figure "4" that reappears throughout Motherwell's paintings of the 1960s.
Both have a specific meaning. Motherwell once described the Elegies as a "lamentation or funeral song" after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell was only twenty-one when the war broke out, but the Elegies became a lodestar for the artist who would go one to paint more than 100 variations on the series from the late 1940s well into the reign of Francisco Franco in 1967. During that time, the series' meaning expanded from Motherwell's own metaphor for injustice to a determinedly universal symbol for the cycle of life and death. By contrast, the Iberia seem to have been vessels for Motherwell to explore and engage in Surrealist "automation"- within bounds. Like the other members of the New York School, whose name he coined, Motherwell sought a universality for his art, believing in the power of images to act as incantations capable of sustaining-and releasing-psychic weight.
The imagery of The Figure 4 comes from such ambitions. As Arnason notes: the left half of the work is painted with the clarity of low relief. In turn, the large and expansive turpentine black form seems to war against the white of the paper. Motherwell's black conjures a host of associations, often described by historians and critics as bull's testicles and Mythic shadows. In the hands of Motherwell, as in the hands of Matisse, black becomes a color, not merely the sign of its absence. The surface of The Figure 4 "records" the violence of its painting - drips and smears, like the splattered mud of cave painting or the blood-in-the-dirt weightiness of one of Picasso's paintings of bullfights. And yet, because The Figure 4 is a Motherwell, the work on paper is not irretrievably savage. The "4" figure is, in particular, painted with calligraphic skills, like a stamp of civilization atop an otherwise ragged scene. One knows how little time it took to paint but one senses the years of practice behind it.
Arnason offers an interpretation of the present work that could only come from his close friendship with the artist. In a 1966 article for Art International, Arnason describes The Figure 4 as part of the expansion of Motherwell's powers as an artist following a divorce and subsequent remarriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler in 1958 and their honeymoon in Italy that year. In short, a postcard from abroad. "These are essentially landscapes," he writes of paintings containing the "4" figure. "The triangle form rears up from a horizontal plane in a manner suggestive of an Apennine mountain crest. At a complete remove the triangle can be read as a sculpture against a an Italian sky." (H.H. Arnason, "Robert Motherwell: The Years 1948 to 1965" Art International, April 20, 1966, p. 38.)
The Figure 4 on an Elegy is a beautiful example of Motherwell's celebrated Elegy series, combining aspects of Iberia with Elegy and other images. As Arnason remarked in his important book on Motherwell: "a freely-brushed, red-brown figure 4, set over the powerfully simple elegaic forms, is related to the triangles and diamonds of the Views and the Summertime in Italy series. The black cloud turns into, or is in the process of enveloping, the ovals and phallic verticals surrounded by splatter and drip in an orgiastic or orgasmic condition of frenzied actuality. The shapes overlap the picture edges on all four sides, creating the effect of a fragment in a state of metamorphous or dissolution" (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1977, p. 56)
H.H. Arnason describes Robert Motherwell's career as a drama of "classical" and "expressive" orders, the patrician and ragged. Indeed, Motherwell's art has always appeared balanced fitfully on the edge of conflict. How else to describe a painter capable of the intelligent and luxurious Open series and as tragic an utterance as the Spanish Elegy? It is the difference, say, between the carefree, uncanny life of Gauloises packets and the suffering of Goya. But the tension has sustained Motherwell's career and some of his best works, such as The Figure 4 on an Elegy.
Hand-selected by H.H. Arnason from the artist's Connecticut studio wall, The Figure 4 is a quintessential Motherwell. The Figure 4 contains the motifs of both the celebrated Spanish Elegy paintings and the Iberia series; in the right half of the work, the bruised, blot-like oval of Motherwell's Spanish Elegy is depicted, hanging like meat in a butcher's window, alongside the iconic figure "4" that reappears throughout Motherwell's paintings of the 1960s.
Both have a specific meaning. Motherwell once described the Elegies as a "lamentation or funeral song" after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell was only twenty-one when the war broke out, but the Elegies became a lodestar for the artist who would go one to paint more than 100 variations on the series from the late 1940s well into the reign of Francisco Franco in 1967. During that time, the series' meaning expanded from Motherwell's own metaphor for injustice to a determinedly universal symbol for the cycle of life and death. By contrast, the Iberia seem to have been vessels for Motherwell to explore and engage in Surrealist "automation"- within bounds. Like the other members of the New York School, whose name he coined, Motherwell sought a universality for his art, believing in the power of images to act as incantations capable of sustaining-and releasing-psychic weight.
The imagery of The Figure 4 comes from such ambitions. As Arnason notes: the left half of the work is painted with the clarity of low relief. In turn, the large and expansive turpentine black form seems to war against the white of the paper. Motherwell's black conjures a host of associations, often described by historians and critics as bull's testicles and Mythic shadows. In the hands of Motherwell, as in the hands of Matisse, black becomes a color, not merely the sign of its absence. The surface of The Figure 4 "records" the violence of its painting - drips and smears, like the splattered mud of cave painting or the blood-in-the-dirt weightiness of one of Picasso's paintings of bullfights. And yet, because The Figure 4 is a Motherwell, the work on paper is not irretrievably savage. The "4" figure is, in particular, painted with calligraphic skills, like a stamp of civilization atop an otherwise ragged scene. One knows how little time it took to paint but one senses the years of practice behind it.
Arnason offers an interpretation of the present work that could only come from his close friendship with the artist. In a 1966 article for Art International, Arnason describes The Figure 4 as part of the expansion of Motherwell's powers as an artist following a divorce and subsequent remarriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler in 1958 and their honeymoon in Italy that year. In short, a postcard from abroad. "These are essentially landscapes," he writes of paintings containing the "4" figure. "The triangle form rears up from a horizontal plane in a manner suggestive of an Apennine mountain crest. At a complete remove the triangle can be read as a sculpture against a an Italian sky." (H.H. Arnason, "Robert Motherwell: The Years 1948 to 1965" Art International, April 20, 1966, p. 38.)