From
Universe to Goddess
The following was one of the first writing assignments given to me while I was studying at Parsons. My graduate seminar professor, Mira Schor, asked us to visit the Museum of Modern Art and look at an artwork (I’m not sure if it had to be a painting or from a specific era/wing/movement) for at least… was it twenty minutes? We were also asked to write answers to specific questions (these appear as bolded & underlined text preceding my responses) while we were viewing our selected artwork, and then perform a more formal research of our selected artwork/artist. Besides minor editing and added links, what follows is what I handed in (warts and all).
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Written by: Jesse Patrick Martin
Graduate Seminar I
Professor Mira Schor
10.9.06
I knew little of Robert Motherwell prior to this assignment. After some research—and, before that, a prolonged viewing of The Little Spanish Prison—it became evident that to know Motherwell is to better understand abstract expressionism, as Motherwell was in many ways the voice of the movement.
Still, we’ve been asked to structure our response to the artwork before including what we’ve researched. Here are the excerpts of my notes taken while observing The Little Spanish Prison at the MoMA:
Robert Motherwell
American, 1915-1991
The Little Spanish Prison 1941-44
Oil on canvas
Gift of Renate Ponsold Motherwell, 1985
The top of the painting is about 6' 5” from the museum’s floor, so it’s about a foot taller than me (though the painting itself is about 3’ x 2’). The viewer can ‘confront’ or ‘encounter’ the painting close-up, like being in a conversation. The painting is floated in a wooden frame. The palette is yellow, grey, white, red, some flesh tones, some brown to delineate the bars—yellow bars or grey bars (optical illusion?) set vertically on canvas. What is the red bar? A disruption of illusion? A formal device used to complicate/assist composition? Is it symbolic? Why does Spain come up so often in Motherwell’s titles? Are we the prisoner, or are we looking into a prison?
The dimensions of the bars are more or less equal to one another, though they clearly waver and are of different approximate measurements. These irregularities suggest a freehand approach, a handmade quality instead of a more mechanical/technical painting style. The red bar is thickly applied, blood-like, tape-like—the vertical bars mimic the museum’s floor slats’ strict verticality, the direction of the wood grain, the slight but evident gradation of tone/color...
Impact on me: Balance: not just within itself, but within the gallery space—actually, it’s the smallest paining in the room with the most symmetrical composition. I like that I can stand in front of it without being overwhelmed... I want to hug it, turn it over, feel its weight, see what’s on its back, remove the canvas from the frame, etc.—it looks like an easily-handled object. It also suggests an actual space (a prison)—no other painting in the room suggests reality as strongly. It’s ironic that it’s a prison, a place of confinement, of containment; an austere, spartan, and depressing space that brings to mind crime, torture, and boredom.
Its scale: Small, intimate, conversation-like: approximately the height and width of an adult’s head and torso. It’s like standing in front of a person. Is the red bar a food/viewing/conversation slot? That wouldn’t really make sense if it’s over open bars... maybe it’s supposed to indicate a locking mechanism, a latch? I’m having trouble not being influenced by the title and its resemblance to the image of prison bars. It’s too easy to turn it into a pictorial representation of reality, of something literal, physical, actual...
How it achieves its effect: What is its effect? Its intimate scale, a limited (basic) palette; a strong, almost symmetrical, balanced composition; a strong verticality that extends across the entire length of the painting, a variation of color/tones on bars; all of the brush strokes are vertical, except on the red bar (horizontal strokes, disruptive); there are twelve bars in all, thirteen if you count the red one...
Its meaning through its visual language: What is its visual language? The painting reinforces the flatness of its surface by mimicking/repeating/mirroring the verticality of the canvas/wall/frame by repeated bars, but also points towards an extended space within/beyond the painting by its reference to prison and the optical illusion caused by placing different colored bars side-by-side. Again, it’s ironic and interesting that an illusion/painting of a prison suggests space beyond itself. A prison confines yet it exists in space. A painting is also confined/confining. This seems to reference incarceration, the figure (subject), perhaps the ‘object-ness’ of ‘pure painting,’ a modernist (Greenbergian) read of painting as tautological, self-contained, about itself and nothing more—but I can’t help but be curious about the painting’s “literature” as pointed to by its title and subsequently reinforced by the image. Why Spain? Why prison?
The painting feels more domestic (for a home, for a friend) than public (for museums, for the masses).
What is its meaning?: Outside of what I’ve already written, this requires research.
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Research led me to a much better understanding of Motherwell and his influence within and beyond abstract expressionism. He was the youngest of the abstract expressionists when they formed and, according to most people, the last of the great abstract expressionists to pass away. Motherwell painted
The Little Spanish Prison while traveling in Mexico with the Chilean surrealist painter
Roberto Matta. Motherwell was twenty-six at the time. It was in Mexico that he met his first wife, though
The Little Spanish Prison was accredited as being a gift from
Renate Ponsold Motherwell, a photographer and Motherwell's fourth (and final) wife. In a
1971 interview with Paul Cummings for the
Smithsonian’s
Archives of American Art, Motherwell discusses the painting as follows:
Paul Cummings: I think it was the end of 1941 or thereabouts that you painted The Little Spanish Prison which seems to be a key picture of that period. What is there about that painting that you feel is so important at that point?
Robert Motherwell: Actually it was the first year I began to paint seriously. Before that I was a student who painted on the side. And I would imagine that that was the first picture in which I hit something that is deep in my character, as two years later when I made my first collages I hit something else that is deep in my character, and as seven years later in making the first Spanish Elegy I hit a third thing that's very deep in my character. But what it is I don't know. What it stands for I don't know.
While Motherwell was always one to defend the ineffable, expressive, emotional impetus behind the abstract expressionist’s practice, he was, as put by
Art Journal’s
Gregory Gilbert, “
one of the few artists of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists who generously made information on his art and theory available through frequent lectures, writings, and interviews.” As opposed to the combative tone adopted by
Gottlieb & Rothko in their response to Edward Jewell’s admitted“befuddlement” with their show, Motherwell was eager to discuss the movement and make its mysterious inner-workings more accessible. Exceptionally well-educated—he attended both Harvard and Columbia, studying philosophy and art history, respectively—Motherwell subscribed to a “Pragmatist philosophy, particularly the views of Dewey, who argued the formation and advancement of liberal culture through communicative interaction” (
Gilbert, 2001). Whereas much of the public and art establishment saw the abstract expressionists as cagey, paintbrush-wielding, misanthropic malcontents, Motherwell acted as a fervent advocate and educator who not only encouraged a better understanding of the movement, but championed and often buoyed the works and careers of many of the movements less social practitioners (i.e. Rothko, Pollock, Gottlieb, etc.)
Many saw Motherwell principally as a writer and speaker rather than an artist. Regardless, Motherwell undertook countless projects throughout his life, including the illustration of poetry books, painting murals, designing wine labels, as well as producing his better-known prints, paintings, and collages. A prolific writer, Motherwell contributed to the surrealist publication
VVV and wrote for multiple art publications—he even coined the term “
New York School.” Besides his relationships and collaborations with various influential figures (John Cage, William Carlos Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, etc.), Motherwell was an instructor for artists Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg.
Though Motherwell believed that artists should speak for their own work—not allowing critics or intellectuals (the ‘cultural elite’) to speak for them or use their work as a means to hang their theories upon—it’s hard not to view him as an exceptional example of the synthesis between artist and theorist, practitioner and philosopher, craftsman and critic. It could also be argued that, despite his stated principals of treating the artist as the ‘primary source’ for art history, Motherwell acted as a self-appointed spokesperson for the abstract expressionists.
Cycling back to the work that generated this inquiry,
The Little Spanish Prison seems to reinforce that the art object is, in fact, minor and supplementary to the actual life of the artist. An artwork is indexical to the artist who produced it, as well as to the concerns sublimated by the work itself. Though earlier in its production,
The Little Spanish Prison hints at Motherwell’s epic
Spanish Elegies, a hundred-plus series of works mourning the impact of the Spanish Civil War. It’s hard to dwell on the formal qualities of a work that seems so meager in comparison to the occurrences that inspired its creation—ironically, it’s through a prolonged attention to these qualities that have led to this inquiry, and the beginning of this artist’s understanding, of Motherwell’s oeuvre.
From Universe to Goddess 
