Accession Number
1996/2.15

Title
Mezzotint in Indigo

Artist(s)
Robert Motherwell

Artist Nationality
American (North American)

Object Creation Date
1968-1969

Medium & Support
mezzotint on cream Auvergne à la Main handmade paper

Dimensions
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm);28 1/8 x 22 1/8 in. (71.28 x 56.04 cm);20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm);8 13/16 x 5 3/4 in. (22.3 x 14.6 cm)

Credit Line
Museum purchase made possible by a gift from Helmut Stern

Label copy
Robert Motherwell showed an early interest in both fine arts and scholarly pursuits. Receiving a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in San Francisco at the age of eleven, Motherwell would not return to formal art training for another fourteen years. During this time, he studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford University and moved east to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy from Harvard in the late 1930s. The following decade he moved to New York, and like fellow New York School painter Ad Reinhardt, studied with art historian Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. Through his teacher, Motherwell met exiled European Surrealist painters in the city during World War II and these friendships inspired him to return to painting. In 1944 he had his first one-person exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s now legendary Art of This Century Gallery which gave many new artists their first public exposure. Beginning in the 1940s his loose, gestural works were often dedicated to a recurrent theme—his best known, the series Elegy for the Spanish Republic, commemorated the Spanish Civil War in over 140 somber and meditative canvases. Though Motherwell had a long and prolific career as a painter, he was also a respected and successful art critic, editor, lecturer, and teacher.
In 1967 Motherwell broke with his emphatically gestural style and embarked upon a new body of work, the Open series, which eventually grew to nearly 100 works. In this series a single field of color covers the support with the exception of a three-sided rectangle drawn in contrasting chalk, descending from the upper edge of the canvas occupying the upper third of the field. The rectangle suggests a door or, perhaps, a window creating the illusion of depth beyond its boundaries. It is a fine example of Motherwell’s interest in the figure/ground relationship and his experiments in abstract compositions that redefine space.
Katie Weiss, Research Assistant, on the occasion of the exhibition The New York School: Abstract Expressionism and Beyond and Beyond, July 20, 2002 – January 19, 2003
In 1967 Motherwell broke with his emphatically gestural series, the Spanish Elegies, on which he had worked for fifteen years and which are characterized by bold traces of the artist’s movements. He embarked upon a new body of paintings, which eventually grew to almost 100 works, called the Open series. In each painting a single field of color covers the whole canvas with the exception of a rectangle, typically drawn in a contrasting color, which descends from the upper edge of the canvas and occupies the upper third of the field. While the rectangle suggests an opening, such as a window or door, Motherwell was not creating the illusion of an actual opening to another space. Rather, he was trying to explore the arrangement of shapes and break down figure/ground relationships. This mezzotint is one of three prints that relate to the Open series.

Primary Object Classification
Print

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
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Keywords
modern and contemporary art