Joy of Living

Joy of Living is an intimate collage by Robert Motherwell, both demonstrative of the work he was creating in the 1940s and foundational to the quality of work he produces later in his career. His robust confluence of different media combines oil, pasted papers, and ink on board. The rich mustard yellow background features the German wrapping paper that hallmarked Motherwell’s work between 1943 and 1948; he had found an assortment of decorative papers in an art store and bought the entire grouping of five sheets. Taken by the distinct patterns and brushstrokes on each, Motherwell felt the papers were imbued with the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. With their hand-colored shapes and prominent creases, Motherwell believed “those papers were by nature, painterly” (R. Motherwell quoted in Warda, J., Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 2013, p. 59). The wrapping paper required an elaborate process of crumpling thin sheets, unfolding them onto a second and smoother sheet of paper, then using a brush to bond the two and preserve the texture. Motherwell imitated that process in later collage works, so the Joy of Living offers a rare take on his earliest inspirations. The Cubist overtones in Joy of Living demonstrate another of Motherwell’s complex influences, as the abstract collage has the brown and yellow hues common to the best-known Cubist examples. Motherwell mused in 1951 that “every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head…it is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss” (R. Motherwell, quoted by J.D. Flam, K. Rogers & T. Clifford, Robert Motherwell paintings and collages: a catalogue raisonné, 1941-1991, New Haven, 2012, p. 16).