The ‘Solitary Studio’ As Muse

Motherwell was quite aware of how important it was to understand a body of work within the context of an artist’s work space. Back in 1944, he tried to convince Alfred H. Barr Jr. (the founding director at MoMA) to buy the studio of Piet Mondrian shortly after the artist’s death.  Mondrian’s studio, Motherwell later wrote, “with its red, blue, and yellow squares, and the thousands of pinholes in the white walls,” was in itself a kind of work of art, “which to a young artist, was a most moving and illuminating insight into his working procedures.”¹

It was in the studio that Motherwell said he felt the most real to himself, and it was in his studios that some of the most interesting evidence of his creative process can be found. For example, though Motherwell kept no formal written journal or diary, he frequently jotted down certain pressing thoughts, essentially short epigrams for the purpose of pinning them to his studio wall.²

In Motherwell’s first set of creative spaces, there was no separation between his living quarters and his painting space.⁴ It was not until 1947 that he would have a space that allowed for a separation between home and studio.

It was not until 1947 that he would have a space that allowed for a separation between home and studio. That year, Motherwell had the architect Pierre Chareau design a home and studio that was built on a two-acre property in East Hampton. Chareau’s design used surplus army Quonset huts and other, simple low-cost materials.

Motherwell believed that the ideal studio would be a place where an artist could work in solitude. In a 1951 essay, “The Rise and Continuity of Abstract Art,” Motherwell places emphasis on the modern artist’s existence as a solitary individual. He goes on to cite a Chinese artist who argued that the best place for a studio is on a mountaintop and that withdrawal from the world is a necessary condition of contemplation — the solitary studio.⁵ The practicalities of everyday life, however, made this difficult, sometimes impossible. The use of his Upper East Side space affirms this. From 1951 to 1953, for example, while he was teaching at Hunter College, he used the dining room of his nearby apartment as his studio.

It wasn’t until he moved to a carriage house in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1970, at the time of his divorce from Helen Frankenthaler, that he found a space that encompassed his ideal of working on a “solitary mountaintop.” Moving away from Manhattan’s social scene gave him more mental space and allowed him to create studio spaces that were tailored to his needs.

In a 1977 interview with French critic Guy Scarpetta, Motherwell explained that the various studios helped him to work out various aspects of his art. “If one problem puzzles me, I can leave the work in progress in situ undisturbed in its own ambiance, and try my hand in another studio; and in constantly passing through the various studios, I sometimes unexpectedly see out of the corner of my eye the solution to an older problem, a solution that may have come from so completely focusing on another problem in another studio, that I can see the older problem more detachedly.”⁷