A new exhibit opening this weekend at Guild Hall explores the early work of East Hampton artist Robert Motherwell and kicks off the cultural center’s summer gala.
Mural Fragment by Robert Motherwell, 1950.
In a 1950 photo by Hans Namuth, a 35-year-old Robert Motherwell stands tall in the scraggly grass outside his East Hampton home and studio: a pair of Quonset huts commissioned from French émigré architect Pierre Chareau. Between artist, thumbs notched in the front pockets of his paint-spattered jeans, and photographer stands a lone cinderblock; turned lengthwise, the humble building material evokes the muscular abstract forms—rows of black ovals punctuated by bar like rectangles—of the works completed by Motherwell inside his modernist bunker.
Robert Motherwell.
These early paintings, collages, and drawings that attracted much favorable attention by critics of the time and gave Motherwell a head start on his fellow Abstract Expressionists have been largely forgotten, overshadowed by his later works. An exhibition opening August 9 at Guild Hall brings them into the spotlight, highlighting Motherwell’s prolific years on the East End, which stretched from 1944 through 1952. Focused on 25 important works from major museums and private collections, the show promises to surprise even those who think they understand Motherwell and his pioneering abstraction.
“Motherwell was almost Zelig-like,” says art historian and critic Phyllis Tuchman, who organized the exhibition. “His time in the Hamptons is bookended by his going off to teach at Black Mountain College and Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock living in his rental as they look for the house on Fireplace Road. And then the last summer he owned his house, [Willem] de Kooning was using it.” Along the way there were chess matches with artist Max Ernst, encounters with composer John Cage, alcohol-fueled all-night conversations with poet Harold Rosenberg, and the first two of his four wives: Maria Ferreira and Betty Little.
Motherwell and Ferreira arrived in Amagansett in the summer of 1944, paying $35 for a summer rental before spending the fall and winter shuttling between Manhattan and a house on East Hampton’s Main Street. It was a breakthrough year for the Washington-born artist, who was educated at Stanford, followed by brief stints as a graduate student at Harvard and later Columbia. The Museum of Modern Art acquired his 1943 collage Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, and he had his first New York solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. Meanwhile, he began editing the multivolume Documents of Modern Art anthology series, a full set of which will be on view at Guild Hall thanks to East Hampton resident Caroline Adler, the daughter of copublisher Heinz Schultz.
Shortly after the 1946 death of his father, a bank president who never quite recovered from the Great Depression, Motherwell invested what he described as a “tiny inheritance”—around $800—in a two-acre plot of land at the corner of Jericho Lane and Georgica Road in East Hampton. Having befriended Chareau after an introduction by author Anaïs Nin, he called on the architect to design a home and studio. The plan was to economize by outfitting two Army surplus Quonset huts with cinderblocks and glass. “It looked like the bargain of a lifetime,” says Tuchman, “Except Chareau was a perfectionist and all of the details had to be made to order, so it went far over the initial cost estimates.” The squat home, which was demolished in 1985, is represented in the exhibition by a scale model.
Portion of The Red Skirt, 1947 by Robert Motherwell.
Leo Castelli and Ileona Sonnabend soon moved in across the street, and Motherwell introduced the art dealers to the American crowd. Having studied with Surrealist Kurt Seligmann, Motherwell was a vital link between European artists and those of the emergent New York School. “The Surrealists were real comrades,” said Motherwell in a 1971 interview. “So if you knew one, pretty soon, you’d know them all.” And while he spoke French, he attributed the connection to a shared intellectual zeal and his own fascination with the Surrealists’ aesthetic based on free association. “What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so everybody who liked modern art was copying it,” he continued. “And all we needed was a creative principle… something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that’s what Europe had that we hadn’t had.”
The works at Guild Hall, including masterpieces The Voyage (1949) and The Homely Protestant (1948), trace Motherwell’s grappling for such a new way. “Motherwell painted over and over what he had on each picture,” notes Tuchman. “He worked automatically—with the technique of a Surrealist but the mind-set of a Cubist and then approached it as an abstract painter.”
Portion of Ulysses, 1947–51 by Robert Motherwell.
In the brutal black-on-white forms of At Five in the Afternoon (1948-49), on loan from the foundation of Helen Frankenthaler (his third wife), one sees the first of the “Spanish Elegy” series that preoccupied Motherwell from the 1950s until his death in 1991. He began developing the theme while in East Hampton, as an illustrated poem by Rosenberg intended for the cover of the never-published second issue of the art journal Possibilities. Limited in palette by plans to reproduce the cover in black and white, he spent weeks perfecting the balance of tones, the weight of the paint, later concluding, “I really conceived something that worked beautifully in black and white.” When asked to reflect upon the years he spent in East Hampton, he replied, “I did some of the best work of my life there.” “Celebrating Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944–1952” is on display August 9 through October 13 at Guild Hall, 158 Main St., East Hampton, 324-0806.