Robert Motherwell: Blood-Stained Papers

From the start of his art making practice, Robert Motherwell worked simultaneously across media, producing paintings, collages, and works on paper in near equal measure with a remarkable consistency of vocabulary. It was, however, his early engagement with paper rather than canvas where Motherwell found his confidence as an artist.

Peggy Guggenheim’s museum/gallery Art of This Century was a formative venue for Motherwell. With its innovative architecture and modernist art collection, it was a major site of cross-pollination between progressive European and American tendencies. Motherwell was among the artists, intellectuals, critics, and collectors who gathered there.¹ Impressed by the young artist, Guggenheim not only urged Motherwell to work in collage for the first time but she also gave him his first solo presentation in 1944, even acquiring key works for her personal collection.²

Buoyed by the positive response his first collage endeavors received, Motherwell submitted an especially bold example, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943)—produced immediately following his father’s death in August 1943—to the Spring Salon for Young Artists 1944.³ Pancho Villa (born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula), celebrated for his humble origins and extraordinary feats in battle, was ambushed while driving through Parral, Mexico, on July 20, 1923. Motherwell described the work as simultaneously depicting two states of being: on the right, a backdrop of dynamic “Mexican ‘wall paper’” (actually a stippled German decorative paper acquired from a New York art supply store) with its “pink genitalia” signify the living Pancho Villa, while on the left, the bandit-rebel’s head riddled with “bloodstains, bullet holes, etc.” is juxtaposed with a pasted section of wood veneer that resembles the lid of a coffin.⁴ Guggenheim was enchanted with the work as was the press, who hailed it as “revealing a vitality and originality which make [Motherwell] a painter worth watching.”⁵ The Museum of Modern Art acquired the collage two weeks before the show opened, marking Motherwell’s first artwork to enter that museum’s collection.

With the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the more recent Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) looming large in Motherwell’s perception of world events, he created, in close temporal proximity to Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, two untitled watercolor and ink drawings whose compositions also suggests an assassination.⁶ Both drawings depict an abstracted figure comprised of three stacked circles at the composition’s left. The bright red splashes scattered across their heads and torsos signify the fresh blood that gushes from the bullets. “All my life I’ve been obsessed by death…all this seized my imagination. For years afterwards, spattered blood appeared in my pictures—red paint,” Motherwell evocatively revealed.⁷

Depictions of violent deaths appear again the following year in several watercolors that also portray abstracted renderings of two or three figures being shot: Three Figures Shot; The Spanish Flying Machine; and four untitled drawings.⁸ It is possible that the artist associated the red blotches that densely spread over each composition as blood-stained bandages. Three Figures Shot is inscribed “6 June 1944,” memorializing the landing of Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy, France, and the thousands of American soldiers who lost their lives on European soil.⁹ The shapes in the upper right of The Spanish Flying Machine may allude to the Spanish Republican Air Force, which failed to dispel General Francisco Franco and his insurrectionary Nationalists.¹⁰ The figures in one of the untitled drawings, once shot, appear to have been moved to a darkened room awaiting identification as suggested by the perspective lines that surround their bodies. Three Personages Shot (12 June) is dated “12 June 1944,” marking various American victories, from the sinking of a Japanese torpedo boat and a German submarine to forming a solid battlefront with British forces along the Normandy coast.¹¹ Motherwell has smeared red ink across the paper, suggesting a continuous bleed out from being shot. The final example of these blood-stain drawings is dated “7-15 / 1944.” Its composition appears isolated on a grey ground with the paper’s left third unused except for a splattering of red ink spills. Although it contains three figures, the left image depicts a female as indicated by her breasts and striped skirt. The middle figure is that of a man, from whom the smears and drips of red ink emanate, while the palette form of the figure at right is a coded reference to the artist. It is worth noting that the struggles Motherwell experienced with his parents found a place within larger world events.

The allusion to firing squads and dead infantry men depicted in these works on paper weighed heavily on Motherwell’s psyche. He drew inspiration from various sources—personal, art historical, and popular—to fuel his creativity. The uncle of Motherwell’s Mexican-born wife, Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyers, fought with Pancho Villa, the stories of which entered his daily life. His familiarity with French nineteenth-century painting, and in particular Édouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1867) that the artist knew from visits to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, provided a historical antecedent. Disturbing reproductions in Life Magazine of dead WWII soldiers released after months of censorship became indelible images for the artist as well.¹²

When assessed collectively, these artworks offer insight into Motherwell’s abiding concern for individual freedoms and his preoccupation with troubling topics. They also convey his ability to employ uniform compositional devices between mediums as he produced work of great originality during the first years of his career.

1. For an in-depth examination of Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, see Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century, ed. Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2004).
   
2. Robert Motherwell: Paintings, Papier Collés, Drawings, Art of This Century, October 24—November 11, 1944. For details on this and Motherwell’s other inclusions in Art of This Century exhibitions, see Susan Davidson, “The Theorist and The Gallerist: Motherwell’s Early Career with Peggy Guggenheim” in Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, exh. cat., (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), 14–29.
   
3. The exhibition dates were May 9–June 3, 1944.
   
4. Motherwell’s description was in response to the museum’s questionnaire pertaining to the subject of the artwork and its possible “personal, topical or symbolic significance.” Drawings Department object file 77.1944, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
   
5. “Strong and Simple Design,” Press clipping, Art of This Century scrapbook, Peggy Guggenheim Foundation papers. M0002. Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York.
   
6. The two drawings bear similar compositions and palettes. D47 was created on Motherwell’s second trip to Mexico, which was cut short by his father’s illness and sudden death. It is inscribed on the verso: “Robert Motherwell \ Mexico July 1943.” Whereas D48 bears only a year date and no creation location. See, Katy Rogers, Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonne, two volumes, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), vol. 2, D47 and D48 entries, 33–35.
   
7. Robert Motherwell, interview with Bryan Robertson, Addenda, 1965, in Stephanie Terenzio, ed. The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 145.
   
8. Rogers, Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonne, vol. 2, D69, D70, D71, D72, D74, and D78 entries, 44–49 and 51–52.
   
9. The Soldier and His Bride also bears the same date, see Rogers, Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonne, vol. 2, D68, 44.
   
10. Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (London: UMI Research Press, 1987), 109–110. According to Mattison, Motherwell suggested this association.
    
11. Blue Nosed Mexican also bears the same date, see Rogers, Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonne, vol. 2, D75, 49.
    
12. Rogers, Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonne, vol. 1, 40-41.