Robert Motherwell: Lyric Suite

The Lyric Suite drawings owe their distinctive sense of materiality in part to the delicate, translucent qualities of the unryu paper on which they’re rendered, purchased impulsively by the artist in a Japanese store in New York. At 9 x 11 inches, their tightness of scale presented a novel challenge for the artist whose monumental Elegies and Open paintings helped define the heroic visual language of Abstract Expressionism. Embodying Motherwell’s instinctive mastery of color and form, they were accomplished in a manner verging on automatism, fed by a complex interaction of the artist’s recent ideas and experiences:

“It came to me in a flash: paint the thousand sheets without interruption, without a priori traditional or moral prejudices or a posteriori ones, without iconography, and above all without revisions or additions upon critical reflection and judgment. Give up one’s being to the enterprise and see what lies within, whatever it is. Venture. Don’t look back. Do not tire. Everything is open. Brushes and blank white paper!”

Through a burst of productivity in April 1965, Motherwell produced approximately 550 of a planned 1000 works before ceasing abruptly the following month after the death of his close friend, David Smith, in May that same year. He worked prolifically that spring, creating 10 to 50 works a day in black ink and later introducing blue, brown, green, red, and violet. The orange ink bleeds, visible in select works, are in fact pigmented separations of the medium itself.