artist
The youngest of all the Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell was a major force in American art for nearly fifty years and is renown to this day for his international stature as a painter, collagist, and printmaker. One of the most celebrated artists of the post-war period, Motherwell pioneered Abstract Expressionism alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline, becoming an artist of international stature. His career encompassed more than five decades, and he received virtually every honor accorded to an artist. His work has been the subject of countless museum exhibitions and publications.
Description
Robert Motherwell's incorporation of musical scores in his collages is a testament to his exploratory and interdisciplinary approach to art. By blending visual and auditory elements, he engaged viewers in a multi-sensory experience that encouraged them to reflect on the relationship between music and visual art, improvisation and composition, and abstraction and representation.
This collage was used as a model for an early state of the large 1981 painting, Music over Music. The sheet music fragment is rom Mozart’s Das Bandel: “Liebes Mandel, wo ist’s Bandel?”
provenance
Knoedler Contemporary to
The [Hannelore] Schulhoff Collection 1976
Capsule Auction Gallery, sold on behalf of the above
literature
Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford. Robert Motherwell: Paintings and Collages, A Catalogue Raisonne, 1941-1991, Vol. 3, Collages and Paintings on Paper and Paperboard, The Dedalus Foundation, (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2012), p. 215, C445, Illustrated in color.
