The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell
A chief spokesman for Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and a voice of New York's artistic avant-garde in the following decades, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was an enormously articulate critic and theorist as well as a first-rate painter. This volume is a patchwork of his essays, lectures, interviews, book introductions, letters, epigrams and random jottings, dating from the years 1941 to 1988. Motherwell's verbal collages comprise an ongoing dialogue with the creative process. His writings illumine his formative relationship with Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta, his obsession with death and his friendships with Mark Rothko, David Smith and Joseph Cornell. Motherwell was acutely aware of the modern artist's isolation from society, and his theory of painting, which extolled free association as the artist's means of excavating his own psyche for universal archetypes, stemmed from that sense of apartness. This grab bag of ideas and impressions includes Motherwell's thoughts on Mondrian, Picasso, children's art, Kafka and Baudelaire. Terenzio is a former curator at the University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art. Illustrated.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.