Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper

Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper, an exhibition organized for circulation by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, will open Monday (Oct. 31) in the Indiana University Fine Arts Building Museum.

The exhibition, to remain on display until Nov. 20, will feature 46 collages, lithographs, works in oil and other paints on paper by Motherwell, one of America’s foremost contemporary painters. The majority of the works, which date from 1953 to the present, were done in the past five years. Some are related to Motherwell’s paintings; others are independently conceived works and series of works.

Director of the exhibit, Frank O’Hara, associate curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, has written that Motherwell’s collages, “taken together, are the most important contribution by an American artist to that medium.” He added that the collages “are full evidence of his unique sensibility for the relation of mass to the density of material…In even the most abstract of the collages one senses the emergence of a dark, sometimes tragic, presence.

This exhibition traveled to Duke University, University of Minnesota, College of St. Benedict, University of Utah, White Memorial Museum, Library Gallery at the University of South Florida, Contemporary Arts Association Houston, Baltimore Museum of Art, Indiana University Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, University of California Riverside, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Sacramento State College.