Beside the Sea

Robert Motherwell had a deep love of the sea, and this virtual exhibition presents a range of works inspired by the sea that he created over a period of twenty-four years. These works show how Motherwell, deeply inspired by the natural world, was able to draw from it new ideas and techniques for his art.

Motherwell was fascinated not only by how the sea looked, but how it acted. In 1962, inspired by the forceful crash of the waves pounding against the sea wall behind his house, he began a series of oil paintings on paper called Beside the Sea. Each of the paintings in the Beside the Sea series employs a motif of one or more horizontal stripes of color – usually blue, black, ochre or green – that suggest the horizon line of the ocean meeting the shore. Above these horizontal bands there rises a fluidly arching splatter of paint, dashed across the paper much like a spray of water crashing against a sea wall.

The vigorous whip-like gestures Motherwell used to evoke the chaotic energy of sea spray became a kind of experiment in metaphoric verisimilitude. He was less interested in recreating the look of nature than in using the processes of nature to recreate its effects. “In the Beside the Sea series,” he later recalled, “I made the painted spray with such physical force that the strong rag paper split, and it was only when I found rag paper laminated with glue in five layers that the surface could take the full force of my shoulder, arm, hand, and brush without splitting. One might say that the true way to ‘imitate’ nature is to employ its own processes.”

A wonderful testament to the inventiveness and versatility with which Motherwell approached his wide range of visual motifs is evident in Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue, which is also featured in this exhibition. In this marvelously tranquil painting, the austerity of his Open series is adapted to evoke the calm expansiveness of the open sea.