Look Who it Was Random video

ROBERT MOTHERWELL : ELEGIES, GESTURES AND OPENS

4,293 views · Published 4 April 2012 · 4:28 · Indexed 30 September 2026

Channel: ERIC MINH SWENSON ART FILMS · 2012 · Howto & Style

Watch on YouTube

Film by Eric Minh Swenson. Music composed by Brett Banducci. Curated by Lee Spiro.

ROBERT MOTHERWELL: Elegies, Gestures and Opens

 Artist's statements about these bodies of work are as quoted in Robert Motherwell, Marcelin Pleynet, Edition Daniel Papierski, Paris 1989.

March 10 - April 21, 2012
ELEGIES
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías  (Last stanza)

At five in the afternoon.
Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

 ~Federico García Lorca

 The force of Lorca's poem and its resonance are far beyond the death of a matador, but perhaps not beyond the death of Spain. I 'meant' the word 'elegy' in the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began. And, I love the 'Spanish Black' that Rafel Alberti writes of and which some years later I illustrated in a 'livre de peintre, A la pintura,' to his poem. The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should never be forgot, even though 'la guerre est finie.' R.M.

GESTURES

The 'Je t'aime Series' was, among other things, a gesture of anger at the increasing tendency toward decorative surface in the development of American avant-garde painting in the mid-1950s, and a manifesto for a return to what the ancient Chinese called 'The Spirit of the Brush.' There is even an ancient Chinese treatise on painting called (to my eternal reassurance) 'The Battle Formations of the Brush.' When Rothko first saw these paintings he loved them. He understood that they were an assertion that I can love, a desperate assertion, though they are often interpreted as being love songs or serenades. R.M.

 OPENS

One day I had a vertical canvas about seven by four feet; I had decided not to use its white ground, and had painted it flat yellow ochre. By studio chance, leaning against it was a smaller canvas with its backside showing - the wooden stretchers - and in looking at the wooden chassis of the smaller rectangle against the larger one, the two together struck me as having a beautiful proportion...   So I picked up a piece of charcoal and just outlined the smaller canvas on the larger one. At the time, I had the notion of either putting imagery outside the smaller space or within it. One day it occurred to me that it really didn't need imagery, that it was a picture in itself, a lovely painted surface plane, beautiful, if minimally, divided which is what drawing is. The image association was 'an opening', and as I made more, the series came to be called the 'Open Series,' for eighty-two reasons; cf. the Random House Unabridged Dictionary entry, 'open.' R.M.

For more info on Eric Minh Swenson or project inquiries visit his website :www.thuvanarts.com

ART SERIES: www.thuvanarts.com/take1
MUSIC VIDEOS: www.thuvanarts.com/musicvideos

Additional music credit: Michael Matsuno, flute, Stella Cho, violoncello

More from this channel