The Red and Black No. 25

“Motherwell's collages amount to a definition of their medium. It is the nature of glued paper to look flat, frontal and spreading; to build its image in planes; to set up counterpoints between word and shape; to make one focus on texture and edge. Motherwell draws by tearing, and the implied violence of the torn edge (which looks and feels very different from the clean-cut edges of Braque's newsprint or Matisse's scissored paper) plays, in collage, the same role as the ejaculatory splattering of paint in his paintings. It is chance, fixed: no one can say how a piece of paper will go when it is torn. This combination of violence and reflection, along with the easel size of the images, is Motherwell's basic addition to the art of collage. In making it, he became the only artist since Matisse in the fifties to alter significantly the syntax of this quintessentially modernist medium."
(Robert Hughes as quoted in R. Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, New York, 1987, p. 294).