Painting: Lochinvar's Return

At dinner before the museum opening, Director of Collections Alfred Barr tapped his wine glass for attention, rose to reminisce: "I think I first heard the name of Bob Motherwell back in the 1940's from the surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Breton. And to hear them describe him, he was then like some young Lochinvar come out of the west." Last week Robert Motherwell went back in triumph to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to receive its greatest accolade: a one-man show, with 87 canvases, collages and drawings, including two outsize abstract canvases never shown before (see color).

It turned out to be a great occasion for mutual admiration. "I was born for modern art and it for me," said Motherwell. For their part, Modern Museum officials happily recalled that the MMA had bought one Motherwell collage, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, in 1943, a year before his first one-man show, when the artist had been painting for only three years. The Modern Museum has kept a close watch on Motherwell ever since; today it owns six of his works.

Modern Blossom. By all the logic of art movements, the dinner should have been a wake. Abstract expressionism has been declared dead; pop and op are up. Yet here was an artist who had painted along with Pollock, Kline, Gottlieb and DeKooning, who had been among the most articulate defenders of the faith and who was now at last having his big moment. On hand for the occasion were such oldtimers as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston to give Motherwell, now 50, a bear hug for his success.

As Motherwell sees it, the really big struggle was back in 1944-54, when the battle for abstract art hung in the balance: "I suppose most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to American art or to any national act, but that there was such a thing as modern art; that it was essentially international in character, that it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in its own way." The walls were breached when abstract expressionism took roots as the first U.S. art movement with international repercussions. "Since then," he muses, "I and my colleagues have been having our own odyssey, returning to our own Penelopes and Ithacas."

First Lesson. "I am a freak," Motherwell confesses. "I didn't start painting seriously until I was 25." The son of a banker, Motherwell was born in Washington, went to Stanford, Harvard Graduate School, the University of Grenoble, and Oxford in pursuit of a respectable Ph.D. before showing up to study with Art Historian Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. In the face of hardheaded parental disapproval, he had been sketching since childhood. When he showed Schapiro his work, the Columbia scholar sent him along for criticism to the lively circle of French surrealists who had been driven by Hitler to take refuge in the U.S. Motherwell's scholarship and knowledge of French poetry earned the surrealists' admiration; his work attracted Patroness Peggy Guggenheim, then married to Top Surrealist Max Ernst. She promptly proceeded to make him the youngest painter in her stable, which included Pollock, William Baziotes and Clyfford Still.