TitleAutomatism Elegy (State I White)
Artist
Robert Motherwell
(American, 1915 - 1991)
Date1980
MediumLithograph on white Arches Cover paper
DimensionsSheet size: 17 13/16 × 22 1/16 in.
Plate size: 4 11/16 × 9 15/16 in.
Mat size: 20 × 24 in.
EditionAP III/VIII from an edition of 40
SignedSigned lower left in graphite: "RM".
SubmissionPosthumous ANA diploma presentation, 1996
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., 1996
Object number1996.1
Label TextA central figure of the Abstract Expressionist group, Robert Motherwell also worked extensively in printmaking over three decades. He initially studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and later at Stanford University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. In the early 1940s he befriended Roberto Matta and other European Surrealists in New York and in 1944 had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery. In 1948, along with William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, he was a founder of The Subjects of the Artist School in New York, a short-lived group concerned with subject matter in abstract art that eventually evolved into The Club. In the summers of 1945 and 1951 Motherwell taught at the experimental Black Mountain College, North Carolina and throughout the 1950s he was on the faculty at Hunter College, New York.Motherwell is perhaps best known for his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, consisting of over 140 large paintings begun in 1949. These are typically composed of vertical bars juxtaposed with oval shapes in black against a white background. The abstract shapes are intended to be visual metaphors of loss and represent the tragic effects of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. His first concentrated effort in printmaking in the 1960s was the direct result of trying collaboration as a means to escape a creative block. At that time, his working relationship with printer Irwin Hollander in New York City provided the needed boost. Motherwell has said of this period, "I had always instinctively loved working on paper, but it was the camaraderie of the artist-printer relationship that tilted the scale definitively." Collaboration and the Surrealist concept of automatic drawing, unimpeded by the conscious mind, are two important components of "Automatism Elegy."
While it is most obviously related to the "Elegy" series, this print has a more specific context, evident from the circumstances of its creation. The aluminum lithographic plate used to print "Automatism Elegy" was initially made for a very similar two-plate lithograph titled "Altamira Elegy," created for the deluxe edition of the 1980 book "Reconciliation Elegy: A Journal of Collaboration" presented by E.A. Carmean, Jr.. The book chronicles the commission and collaborative execution of Motherwell's "Reconciliation Elegy" for the newly constructed East Building of the National Gallery of Art. Instead of reproducing the painting in the lithographic medium for the book, Motherwell continued to develop the motif, adding the association of the primal quality of the cave paintings of Altamira, Spain through its title. "Altamira Elegy" and "Automatism Elegy" can be seen as an attempt to overcome the artist's dissatisfaction with the painting, which he felt lost its monumentality when seen in the museum, but "is alive close up." Each of the lithographs translates the liveliness of the painting into a work on paper of small scale, which must be viewed up close.
