Twelve Drawings from Robert Motherwell’s Lyric Suite

June 9, 2007 - Aug. 12, 2007
Virginia Steele Scott Gallery

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was a leading artist and theorist of Abstract Expressionism, a revolutionary artistic movement that emerged in New York in the 1940s.  Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, he created “action paintings” that represent the existential experience of the artist in post-war America through forceful, gestural abstraction.

In a period of just two months in 1965, Motherwell created the nearly 600 drawings that comprise the Lyric Suite as an exercise in automatic drawing, a technique pioneered by the Surrealists in which the artist attempts to produce drawings from the unconscious mind. Motherwell wrote in 1969 that the experiment gave him the opportunity to paint:

“Without a priori traditional or moral prejudices or a posteriori ones, without iconography, and above all without revisions or additions upon critical reflection and judgment.  Give up one’s being to the enterprise and see what lies within, whatever it is.  Venture.  Don’t look back.  Do not tire.  Everything is open.” 

He completed the drawings in seconds with brushstrokes “made with as much violence as possible without tearing the paper.”  After Motherwell finished drawing, he allowed the ink to spread out uncontrolled on the absorbent rice paper so that the drawings “continued to paint themselves.”  This incorporation of chance further demonstrates Motherwell’s debt to the Surrealists, who invited accidents into their work.  Motherwell originally set out to create a suite of 1,000 drawings, but he stopped work on the project after the death of his close friend, sculptor David Smith on May 23, 1965.  The title of the series, Lyric Suite, refers to a musical composition for string quartet by Alban Berg that Motherwell listened to while making the drawings.

Motherwell studied art at the Otis Art Institute and philosophy at Stanford and Harvard Universities.  After moving to New York in 1940, he met several Surrealist artists and writers, including the movement’s founder André Breton, when they fled Europe during World War II.  Inspired by their use of automatism, as well as Pablo Picasso’s abstract Cubism of the 1930s, existential philosophy, and Freudian psychology, Motherwell began creating powerful abstract drawings, paintings, and collages evoking loss and alienation. 

By 1951, he had begun his epic series of paintings Elegy to the Spanish Republic, introduced the term Abstract Expressionism to the United States, and helped America understand the movement through writings and speeches.  At the Huntington, the twelve Lyric Suite drawings join Motherwell’s Capriccio, a painting from 1945. 

To celebrate the acquisition of the drawings, a partial gift of the Dedalus Foundation and purchase with funds from the Connie Perkins Endowment, they will be on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery from June 9 to August 12, 2007.