I cannot even remember how I came across this painting by Robert Motherwell but it has found a discreet place on my desktop and there it has lain like an old flag for months now and has continually drawn my attention.
I am surprised by my own attraction to this picture to be very honest. But I am. There is something that pierces through all my ideas about what I think defines a painting and it goes straight into my taste buds. Maybe it proves that I really shouldn't have any bright ideas about what defines a painting in the first place. But hey! Everyone else has ideas about painting; the artists, the critics, the galleries (though it's purely about bling), the public, the everyday Joe at home with a few pictures hanging about on the walls of his home. Art engenders ideas in fact, and isn't that cool enough? But it also shocks and enrages, as well as it reassures, especially those lucky ones who own expensive pieces hanging on walls in large homes around the world.
So, what is it with this picture? And why does it have a hold over me? Am I superficial enough to just like it because of its Ultramarine blue, a colour of which I am extremely partial? I have only a slight idea of what the context is around this picture from looking through the Google's collection of Robert Motherwell. He appears to have made numerous works that vaguely resemble boats and sails so it seems likely that this is one of those.
Honestly, any frequent reader in these pages will recognise that I have pretty discerning taste when it comes to looking at Art, so they wouldn't be surprised that I'm not crazy about the oeuvre of Robert Motherwell. He was an early Non-Figurative American Expressionist who had big ideas about a lot of big things just like so many of us arty types. They say he was an intellectual and wrote a great deal.
He was an experimenter, like all from the American Expressionist School, because they were up to something pretty novel in a way. They wanted to explore non-figuration as an art form. I call their attempt 'pretty novel' because they were bucking several thousand years of artistic traditions concerning Form and Content. But hey! Why not? This was the Post-Freudian world of analysis after all. It was an epoch that put everything up on the chopping block for both investigation and self-examination.
But like we see in this the current political upheaval in America, if you want to break things of value, it behooves you to have a replacement for it because as we all know, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I know it's not fashionable to harbour this idea but honestly, I'm not really convinced that the American Expressionist school left much of a legible legacy for those of us who came afterward to surf the next set of waves.
Judging from what I saw on Google I found Robert Motherwell's legacy to be untidy, unspooled, arbitrary, and lacking in much cohesion.
Sooooo, why am I crazy about this picture above? I am happy to say that I learned a long time ago to judge the artwork, not the artist. Picasso, for instance, made lots of junk over his lifetime and he squandered his enormous talents by making kitsch. Yet nonetheless, he painted Guernica, an iconic masterpiece. I'll take back for saying this but only 5% of his oeuvre was truly great. So, when someone asks me "what do you think of so and so, I'll respond; What work are you specifically asking about?"
This is how I've come to navigate the tricky pathway into art criticism. This is just my own way, one that suits my own intellectual and aesthetic disposition.
In the end, all painters make duds here and there. I've made many but like Tennis, it's all about the statistics; the more matches one wins, the better one's ranking but that doesn't mean that the thousands of magnificent points over a career, now long forgotten, were not magnificent on their own.
So, I haven't even answered my own question about why I feel something so intimately strong about Motherwell's picture. Maybe next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment