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Lot Essay
Consisting of cigarette packages collaged onto a brilliant red background, Gauloises on Scarlet over Yellow No. 3 is a balanced yet striking example of Robert Motherwell’s collaged canvas boards. Originally executed in 1972, the artist chose to revisit the work ten years after first creating it, pulling the red ground up to the immediate edges of the collaged cigarette package to fill the empty white space that surrounded it. The result is undeniably a more complete, more powerful and more commanding composition than the other large examples from the series.
While Motherwell had experimented with Gauloises cigarette packages in his collages as early as 1956, he initiated the Scarlet series in February 1972, in which the serene blue packages were dynamically contrasted against the vibrancy and energy of a red ground. The few yellow striations that emanate vertically from the packages create an effect similar to that of rhythmic cords maintaining a sultry, swaying, spirited tempo. That sense of abstract movement also recalls the modern masters that preceded Motherwell—Pablo Picasso, Serge Gainsbourg, Albert Camus—all loyalists of the Gauloise brand who immortalized it in art, song and text, helping to establish it as a pillar of French identity and a symbol of 20th century Modernism. For Motherwell, incorporating into his own oeuvre “the deft and condensed allusion to ‘French blue’: to the Mediterranean and the palette of Matisse, to Paris and the café society of post-war Existentialism, to the smoke curling upwards in a Cubist assemblage” was as much of an homage to these masters as it was an exploration into what it mean to be a part of this iconic French history (B. Jacobson, Robert Motherwell: The Making of an American Giant, London, 2015, p. 98).
While Motherwell had experimented with Gauloises cigarette packages in his collages as early as 1956, he initiated the Scarlet series in February 1972, in which the serene blue packages were dynamically contrasted against the vibrancy and energy of a red ground. The few yellow striations that emanate vertically from the packages create an effect similar to that of rhythmic cords maintaining a sultry, swaying, spirited tempo. That sense of abstract movement also recalls the modern masters that preceded Motherwell—Pablo Picasso, Serge Gainsbourg, Albert Camus—all loyalists of the Gauloise brand who immortalized it in art, song and text, helping to establish it as a pillar of French identity and a symbol of 20th century Modernism. For Motherwell, incorporating into his own oeuvre “the deft and condensed allusion to ‘French blue’: to the Mediterranean and the palette of Matisse, to Paris and the café society of post-war Existentialism, to the smoke curling upwards in a Cubist assemblage” was as much of an homage to these masters as it was an exploration into what it mean to be a part of this iconic French history (B. Jacobson, Robert Motherwell: The Making of an American Giant, London, 2015, p. 98).