Art: Paris' Prodigal Son Returns

If any American painter is entitled to be considered the prodigal son of French modernism, it is Robert Motherwell. So a festive sense of homecoming rises from the retrospective of some 150 Motherwell paintings and collages being shown throughout the summer at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. At last month's opening, one could almost hear the squeals of the fatted calf on the block.

Today, at 62, Motherwell is an American master (one of the very few around), but that is a recent reputation. Through the '40s and '50s in New York, when he was the youngest of the original abstract expressionist group, his conscious Francophilia set him rather apart from his colleagues. It was often taken as a denial of American newness. as a manifesto of eclecticism. Other artists dissimulated their debts to French painting or let critics bury them. Not Motherwell. Thus he was much abused as a mock European, all taste and private income—a Dick Diver, not attuned to the harsh and epic voice of the American pictorial myth.

The rise in this admirable artist's reputation over the past ten years has had much to do with the slow realization in America that serious art is indivisible, that the mere fact of being American does not conscript a painter into a doomed Oedipal struggle with his European ancestors, that the battlegrounds of art history soon revert to pastures. There is no secret about Motherwell's sources: cubist collage, surrealism, Matisse. In fact, his own collages —perhaps the most consistently beautiful body of work produced by any artist in the past five years—could not exist without the example of Matisse's découpages. His natural tone as a painter is probably the closest any American artist has come to that of Matisse.

Land of Superego. Motherwell creates a world of remarkably exact feeling, into which one can move without strain, while knowing at each moment that the precision of his sensuousness is there to correct the randomness of ours. This mixture of joyousness and didacticism pervades the best of French modernism, but Motherwell is the one American artist who can make it work.

How does he do it? By reserve—literally, by inhibition, the mother of taste. Significantly, he entitled an early "self-portrait" of 1947-48 Homely Protestant, a phrase he picked at random from a page of Joyce. Motherwell was not the only Wasp among the New Yorkers who created abstract expressionism, but he was certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint—the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward—across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town of the Cartesian odalisque.

There, literature and painting—the word and the image, deadly enemies in America—had merged. This fusion had been started a century before by Baudelaire, Mallarme and the symbolists. Their belief in direct equivalences between color, sound, sensation and memory struck Motherwell as one of the supreme achievements of culture: the key to modernist experience. It enabled the homely Protestant to hold his feelings tight in a cultural matrix.