HOUSTON, TX.- The Menil Collection opened the most comprehensive survey ever mounted of the drawings of Robert Motherwell (1915-1991). The show will be on view exclusively at the Menil Drawing Institute through March 12, 2023. With more than 100 works spanning the artist’s career from the 1940s through the 1980s, Robert Motherwell Drawing:

As Fast as the Mind Itself is organized by the Menil with the support of the Dedalus Foundation, established by the artist in 1981. The exhibition celebrates the publication of Robert Motherwell Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonné, a two-volume publication devoted to Motherwell’s drawings.

The youngest and most scholarly of the artists who came to be identified as Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell explored a personal, spontaneous language of mark-making throughout his life, creating drawings in a wide variety of techniques and styles that he sometimes used concurrently. Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself will bring together works from the Menil’s own holdings and from two dozen public and private collections to show the full range of the artist’s practice—including his major series the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Beside the Sea, Lyric Suite, Drunk with Turpentine, and the Opens—revealing the cohesiveness underlying Motherwell’s remarkable array of motifs, styles, textures, and moods.

Rebecca Rabinow, Director of the Menil Collection, said, “The Menil Collection is proud to present the drawings of Robert Motherwell, whose lifelong fascination with drawing was at the core of his significant artistic achievements. John and Dominique de Menil first visited Motherwell’s studio in 1952 and later acquired work by him. The museum has continued to collect works by Motherwell, most recently the painting Sea of Sand, 1973, and fourteen drawings that are promised gifts. From early Surrealist works to the artist’s late gestural abstractions, this exhibition will provide an invaluable opportunity for visitors to experience the boldness and intensity of Motherwell’s extraordinary career.”




Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, said, “Inspired by Surrealism and the practice of automatic drawing, Robert Motherwell embraced the suggestive potential of his drawing materials, blending the accidental and the intentional in the creative gesture, whether a stroke of the pen or brush or a tear in paper. He did not draw to imitate reality, but to give form to his intuition of the inner workings of the world, through a practice geared toward invention and variation. While the work evolved stylistically, it remained united by its continuities and his desire to draw ‘as fast as the mind itself.’”

The exhibition explores several aspects of Motherwell’s practice, including his dialogue between the geometric and organic, and his diverse approach to calligraphic mark-making. Motherwell loved paper for the natural beauty of its surface and for its inherent resistance to corrections and second thoughts, which allowed him to be spontaneous.

Motherwell’s early drawings from the 1940s show the influence of a broad range of artists whom he admired, including Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. During this period, Motherwell explored figural structures and abstraction. This led him to the frieze-like compositional structure seen in his breakthrough series, the Elegies.

In the 1960s, Motherwell created additional series, including Beside the Sea, the Lyric Suite, and the Opens, each represented in the Menil’s survey. As he wrote of his Lyric Suite, “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.

The artist’s later works shifted toward a more formal restraint and an almost exclusive use of black. A large number of gestural works made in 1979 would come to be known as the Drunk with Turpentine series. Executed on paper in oil mixed with turpentine, these works are invariably marked by a yellowish halo around the black paint from the oil migrating through the paper over time. In the more concise examples, Motherwell pared down his compositions to freely drawn lines and simple shapes, such as triangles and rectangles.

In Motherwell’s 1970 essay “Thoughts on Drawing,” republished in the Menil Collection’s exhibition catalogue, the artist wrote, “Drawing satisfies our sense of definition, even if we cannot define “drawing” itself. Drawing is a racing yacht, cutting through the ocean. Painting is the ocean itself.”