Fette, from the series Silent March, Berlin, December 2011. More.
—
Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself.
James Joyce, To Nora, Dublin, December 6, 1909. Via. More letters.
Haikuesday, February 14th, 2012
ring over index,
straightened; the middle free to
please the inner walls
![Ten-Minute Art School Course
Robert Motherwell
Possessing perhaps the best and most extensive formal education of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell was well-versed in literature, philosophy, and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints, and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts, and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy, and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events, and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression, and revolution.
Motherwell’s first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen-and-ink drawings, collectively called the “Mexican Sketchbook,” show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell’s career then received a jump-start in 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.
In the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing, and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York’s Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential Documents of Modern Art series, the publication Possibilities, and The Dada Painters and Poets anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.
The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series— the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known— began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called At Five in the Afternoon, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression, and resistance.
Composed between 1953-1957, the artist’s second major group of work is called the Je t’aime series, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the Elegies paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell’s collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist’s interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.
Motherwell began his third major series, the Opens, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct— in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field— in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.
Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing, and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As arguably the most eloquent and intellectually accomplished of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell’s legacy is significant not only for the importance of his paintings, but also for the breadth and influence of his writing, editing, and teaching. Yet, it is first and foremost in the artist’s work— which both bridged and challenged the duel influences of European and American Modernism, and which, despite its interest in formal dialogues, never neglected the necessity of human empathy— that Motherwell’s legacy will continue to endure.
[via]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzcbhhzXTy1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Robert Motherwell
Possessing perhaps the best and most extensive formal education of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell was well-versed in literature, philosophy, and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints, and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts, and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy, and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events, and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression, and revolution.
Motherwell’s first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen-and-ink drawings, collectively called the “Mexican Sketchbook,” show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell’s career then received a jump-start in 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.
In the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing, and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York’s Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential Documents of Modern Art series, the publication Possibilities, and The Dada Painters and Poets anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.
The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series— the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known— began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called At Five in the Afternoon, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression, and resistance.
Composed between 1953-1957, the artist’s second major group of work is called the Je t’aime series, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the Elegies paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell’s collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist’s interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.
Motherwell began his third major series, the Opens, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct— in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field— in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.
Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing, and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As arguably the most eloquent and intellectually accomplished of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell’s legacy is significant not only for the importance of his paintings, but also for the breadth and influence of his writing, editing, and teaching. Yet, it is first and foremost in the artist’s work— which both bridged and challenged the duel influences of European and American Modernism, and which, despite its interest in formal dialogues, never neglected the necessity of human empathy— that Motherwell’s legacy will continue to endure.
[via]
Sonic Youth: “Kool Thing”
(Source: iloveretro)
I think if somebody has to make an artistic work, he will finish it no matter what. It has nothing to do with the money, with the time. I was sure that I was not made for artistic work, and I tried to make another kind of work. I was supporting myself, you know, making all sorts of shit work that everybody else does. And I got completely depressed. I had to take pills, and I was really not well. So it wasn’t that I decided [to be an artist]; I just didn’t have any other way out. It was that or I would be in the mental hospital. It was as easy as that.Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi on artistic freedom, creative process, and why the majority is always wrong. (via curiositycounts)
(via notational)
step ball change
this is the pace, the temp, the groove
this is the funk, the spiral, the move
learn the steps get on stage
smile on cue turn the page
moledro
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
(via kelseyyrose)
