“We have only to look at the force of one of the Opens…to feel the complexity of observation the painter requires of himself and the viewer.”
A mesmerizing exemplar from the artist’s notable Open series, Robert Motherwell’s Gulfstream blissfully overwhelms with elegiac blues and ochres at a remarkable scale. Executed in 1980, Gulfstream captures the painterly vigor and cerebral brilliance of Motherwell’s best known works with evocative restraint and captivating movement. Focusing on the theme of the window, the meditative works in the Open series create a metaphor for the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Often consisting of monochromatic areas of color intersected with vertical and horizontal lines, the Open works exemplify the artist’s conceptual and philosophical standpoint, his strong ties to Minimalism, and his role as one of the foremost Abstract Expressionists. Gulfstream is a particularly distinguished and coveted example from the series, having remained in the esteemed private collects ion of Robert and Renate Motherwell for over forty years. In its fusion of compelling form and rhythm, Gulfstream offers a dynamic glimpse of the virtuosic painterly abstraction from one of Motherwell’s most archetypal compositions that characterizes the artist’s celebrated practice.
Renowned for his extensive formal education and academic approach to painting, Motherwell’s contributions to the field of Abstract Expressionism indelibly altered the course of Post-War American art. Before deciding to become a painter Motherwell studied philosophy at Stanford and Harvard, where he cultivated a method of thought and feeling that would perpetuate his painterly meditations for the rest of his life. Two principle philosophies provided the guiding light for Motherwell’s practice—the belief in the power of abstraction as well as the power of feeling. These sent.mes nts are perhaps best exemplified in Gulfstream, which commands a poetic presence and invites rich contemplation in its captivating painterly realm. Gulfstream is a brilliant synthesis of Motherwell’s Open series, incorporating lively brushwork in vast color fields with linear disruptions suggesting the intervention of space. The blue expanse in the present work is energized and alive, full of gestural washes and texture that evinces a lyrical spirit. While swathes of subtly shifting paint dance across the surface, moments of underlying ochres, soft grays and a deeper blues just begin to peek through. The evidence of variation and labor in Motherwell’s brushwork activates the work as an atmospheric space for silence and intimate contemplation. Unlike the typical, thickly graphic three-part ‘U’ lines in the Opens, Gulfstream is marked by only two thin black vertical lines, with a near invisible horizontal line meeting between them. It is as if the composition is even further opened to a space beyond.
"Motherwell's intense feeling for the brushstroke is evident and persists even in those versions which seem at first glance most uniform in color and texture. No matter how much he has selected and eliminated in order to achieve his effect of unity, he is never concerned with the creation of a 'system' or an 'object.' All the Open paintings maintain the sense of air, of openness, of variation within the color field."
The Open paintings mark a departure from Motherwell’s study of balancing the equation of disparate forms on canvas evident in his earlier Elegies series and with his extensive collage practice. With each Open, Motherwell explores the concept and compositional strength created when he divides the previously unified field into separate elements, masterfully positioning form and color in a rapport which activates the compositional dimensions of the canvas in physical space. The persistent and unyielding tension which results conveys the oscillation between order and chaos central to Motherwell’s practice. As described in the catalogue raisonné of the artist, “Motherwell’s paintings and collages are marked by a number of oppositions, the most obvious of which could be characterized as the tension between spontaneity and deliberation, between pictures that appear to have been done with a minimum of planning, simply by letting the hand move, and pictures where the forms appear to have been laid down with great calculation. This tension underlies Motherwell’s compulsive need to rework his pictures, which was a way of readjusting the balances not only between forms but between different kinds of feeling” (Jack Flam, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941-1991, Vol. 1: Essays and References, New Haven, 2012, p. 6).
“Motherwell’s Open paintings contain in themselves, as in their intention, an incontrovertible breathing space. They have sills and urge us to think of thresholds.”
Motherwell's oeuvre is consistently underpinned with a delicate yet moving elegance, no matter how raw and powerful the gesture. With Gulfstream, Motherwell discovers an incredibly elastic pictorial language that communicates painterly force on multiple levels and yet eludes simple resolution. Exceptional for its rich tonality of color and thoughtful exploration of gesture and line, Gulfstream explores the very nature of abstraction and representation itself; here, Motherwell creates an enigmatic abstract landscape that, while resolutely foregoing an illusionistic representation of the natural world, draws the viewer into a hypnotizing spatial pool, an alternate reality that reverberates within the confines of the canvas.
