Art: Master of Anxiety and Balance

In Buffalo, the magisterial abstractions of Robert Motherwell

One does not usually think of art shows in terms of seasons, but the Robert Motherwell retrospective that opened last week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo is certainly autumnal: a life's work fully matured, all its lights, smokes and fermentations distinct, its promises ripely fulfilled. The show, organized by Curator Douglas G. Schultz, is not a huge affair in proportion to the size of Motherwell's output. There are, in all, 93 paintings and collages to represent a man whose oeuvre must be ten or even 20 times that size.

Motherwell is 68, the youngest member of the group whose name he coined: the New York School, or, as the history books say, the abstract expressionists. Pollock, Rothko, Still, Newman, Baziotes, Gorky, Smith and Kline are all dead; only Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Motherwell are still at work. In the meantime the achievements of the abstract expressionists have become so encased in legend, fetishized by the market and picked over by scholarship that their work, in the eyes of younger generations, has assumed a somewhat fabled air. Like grizzled bison in a diorama, they suggest a lost age of American pioneering. The sheer weight of the cultural appetites their work helped set in motion has turned them into monuments against their will.

This process has proved particularly unfair to Motherwell, because his full maturity as an artist came after the abstract expressionist "period"—in fact, after 1960 — and his career illustrates the perils of generalizing about decades, groups or movements. Of course there are expressionist elements in Motherwell, and strong ones at that. But the rhythm of this show obliges one to discard the hearty cliche of the abstract expressionist as a kind of existential romantic, flinging pots of paint in the eyes of fate.

What we see is not what legend tells us to see. For Motherwell is a painter of superb though admittedly fitful balance who has managed to raise a magisterial syntax of form over an undrainable pond of anxiety, and the apparent fluctuation of his art between the "expressive" and the "classical" really depends on how much of that water is showing around its foundations. He is not a great sublimator, like Matisse or Braque. Yet in its breadth, grace, discipline and lucidity, as in the standards of self-criticism that are embedded in its patrician rhetoric, his art is genuinely Apollonian. Even its disorder speaks of a nostalgia for order.

That such traits are strengths seems obvious today, amid the lax and clamorous egotism of most neo-expressionist painting. But it was not always so. Twenty years ago, Motherwell's reflective temper, his unabashed reverence for the Parisian past and, above all, his wish to bring modernist writing from Mallarme to Joyce into the ambit of his art made critics uneasy. Surely this was all a trifle historicist, a bit too stylish?