Robert Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy
Daniel Barbiero
November 2022
Reconciliation Elegy 1978
“Problem: in the midst of architectural grandeur to strike a personal note, the note of the human presence…of a twentieth-century solitary individual, that terrible burden…and somehow make it public, too…”
-Robert Motherwell, Reconciliation Elegy: A Journal of Collaboration (ellipses in original)
This is how Robert Motherwell described the task he assigned himself in executing a commission for the new East Building of the National Gallery of Art, then under construction. The building, by architect I.M. Pei, is a massive, angular structure of concrete and marble dust designed in a classic late modernist style. The interior, where Motherwell’s work would be sited, is an open, airy space defined by plain surfaces and natural light. Seven artists were commissioned to create works for the new building, which opened in 1978. Among these works, Motherwell’s was the only painting–the Reconciliation Elegy, a 10’ x 30’ abstract painting of elegant simplicity and rich meaning.
The painting’s simplicity derives from its formal structure and its restricted palette. It consists of two large, irregular, and biomorphic black shapes against a white background, one dominating the right two-thirds of the canvas, and the other taking up the center of the other third. The form on the right, the larger of the two, is made up of three rounded, near-ovals alternating with thick vertical columns gently curving away from the center and toward the right edge of the canvas. This curvature suggests the figure’s being pulled at speed by some invisible force toward the shape on the left. The latter consists of a thick, vertically-oriented rectangle with a ragged bottom edge and a more-or-less perpendicular protruberance reaching out toward the shape on the right. A gulf of white separates the two. Both shapes are contained within a lightly rendered, narrow rectangular perimeter running just inside the edge of the canvas. Although the painting contains light streaks of blue and pink, the overall impression it creates is of an austere, black and white composition.
In both its formal construction and its largely black and white color scheme, Reconciliation Elegy bears a strong resemblance to the series of Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings Motherwell had been producing since the late 1940s. Like the Reconciliation Elegy, the Elegies to the Spanish Republic are abstract works organized around variations on the column-and-egg motif. In fact, Motherwell’s original conception of the Reconciliation Elegy was that it would be another painting in the Spanish Republic series. It began as a revision of 1963’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 100, to which it bears a direct resemblance. In fact, the Reconciliation Elegy represents something of a loosely-rendered interpretation of the revised version of No. 100. Motherwell had reworked the original No. 100 to incorporate as a new motif in its left-most section a figure taken from a new painting, The Spanish Death, of 1975. The Reconciliation Elegy’s formal layout matches the layout of the revised No. 100 very closely, although there are differences. The Reconciliation Elegy modifies the figures in No. 100 by dropping the right-hand shape’s left-most column and by condensing and blurring the older painting’s right-most oval forms and column into an ambiguous mass. But the biggest difference between them is in the evidence of Motherwell’s hand, specifically in the curvature of the Reconciliation Elegy’s lines, the irregularities of its figures’ borders, and the splotches that seem to fly off of the figure on the right as it’s pulled into the gravitational field of the figure on the left. This loose appearance is the result of a deliberate choice made for both methodological and programmatic reasons.
As he explained in remarks published in Robert Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy: A Journal of Collaboration, Motherwell wanted the painting to convey a sense of spontaneity despite its monumental scale. Asian calligraphy, with its “immediacy,” suggested one methodological model, but drawing more directly on his own past experiments with the Surrealists in exile in the 1940s, he also wanted Reconciliation Elegy to contain some element of automatism, even if the painting’s general appearance was consciously planned. Programatically, Motherwell wanted Reconciliation Elegy to carry an appearance of spontaneity because he wanted it to be “a painting as clear and personal and unarchitectonic as a human voice, which is to say a spontaneous work that sang” (Journal, p. 68).
The Elegy
The Reconciliation Elegy is, first of all, an elegy—a work of mourning. The large swathes of black would seem to underscore this–and they do, given the traditional association of black with mourning. Interestingly, Motherwell originally considered using bright colors for the painting, but ultimately rejected the idea. This was partly for technical reasons. He’d never before worked with bright colors on such a large scale, and felt that the commission’s condensed timeline didn’t allow him the luxury of a great deal of trial-and-error. But he also rejected bright colors because of what he wanted to express with the painting. As he noted in the Journal, bright colors “no longer represent[] social reality,” which he saw as playing out “[a]gainst the background of possible nuclear holocaust,” and as reflecting western civilization’s choosing mastery over nature and consequently having “doomed [itself]…with an industrial technology for which there is neither the wisdom nor the political mechanism to control” (Journal p. 71 & p. 77, ellipses in the original). Black and white would be more appropriate to his design, but not because Motherwell wanted to set up a conventionally simple equation of black with mourning. For Motherwell, black was a color among colors, even if one with a potentially powerful symbolic significance. As he explained in a 24 June 1974 interview with Richard Wagener,
When I use black, I don’t use it in the way most people think of it, as the ultimate tone of darkness, but as much as color as white or vermilion, or lemon yellow or purple, despite the fact that black is no color, non-being, if you like. Then what more natural than a passionate interest in juxtaposing black and white, being and non-being, life and death? (CW, p. 219).
With the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Motherwell had already shown how the dramatic juxtaposition of black and white could allow an abstract painting to be effective in conveying, in a suggestive, non-discursive way, the sense that he wanted to convey. And that sense was of both the contrast, and interrelationship of, life and death. It is because these are abstract paintings whose meaning inheres in the effect they create, through pure relationships of form and color, that they have the capacity to extend their meaning beyond what their titles indicate and to reach toward something more general. The Elegies effectively go beyond memorializing the Spanish republic as a specific historical event and serve as well as elegies to the larger tragedies of the mass violence of the 20th century. In implying this larger meaning, they effectively lend the Spanish Civil War the status of a condensed symbol for a violent century.
With the Reconciliation Elegy, Motherwell was thinking in just such broad terms about what he wanted the painting to mean. It would address the tragic situation of the twentieth century, as epitomized by the recklessness of the industrialized west. And the sheer expanse of the painting does effectively imply a meaning that takes in the vast sweep of an era. Motherwell was aware that the painting’s size and horizontal orientation were very close to Picasso’s Guernica; in a sense the Reconciliation Elegy, with its signification of the tragic in a more generalized way, represents a logical successor to Guernica. Unlike Guernica, which directly depicts a violent event through narrative figuration, the Reconciliation Elegy’s abstract black forms, with their organically ragged edges, create their effect by connotation rather than denotation. They don’t allude directly to the industrialized violence of an era notable for collective aggression on an unprecedented scale, but rather imply the devastated silence of the aftermath to that violence. Which is what an elegy, as a commemoration of loss, does.
The Choice of Reconciliation
A number of factors contributed to Motherwell’s choosing the theme he did for the East Building commission. Although the original idea had been that the painting would fall within the series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, between the time the painting was commissioned and the time he began finalizing its concept, Francisco Franco had died and Spain had become a constitutional monarchy. In the Journal, Motherwell recalls a conversation he had with the Spanish artist Tápies around the time the painting was being planned; the two talked about “new hopes for humanism in Spain” (Journal p. 77), as it could reasonably be anticipated that Spain would become the liberal polity it had failed to become in the 1930s. Because this failure was one of the primary motivations for Motherwell’s series of elegies; it is possible that with the change in regimes in Spain, Motherwell felt that the East Building painting could take on a new theme. As we’ve seen, he was thinking that the painting should express something of the social realities of the time, which he described in nearly apocalyptic terms.
But more personal motivations were at work as well. During the period of its commissioning, he was approaching sixty and anticipating radical surgery for a serious illness. This brought him to an insight that would make its way into the intended meaning of the painting. As he noted in the Journal, the theme of the painting, as summarized by its title, “unconsciously correspond[ed] to a certain stage in my life, life and death are now to me subjectively less antagonistic…I see with age that death is part of life…” (Journal p. 77, ellipses in the original).
The “reconciliation” of the Reconciliation Elegy, then, was a reconciliation with death and beyond that, with an understanding of life and death as complementary moments within the complete unfolding of one’s existence. Such a reconciliation carries a profoundly existential weight, as it certainly appears to have for Motherwell. That Motherwell saw things through an existential lens is clear from remarks he made to Wagener in 1974, stating that “the whole problem is for one’s experience to be authentic, not rhetorical, which implies, in a secular and individualist society, an existential position” (CW p. 216). When Wagener asked Motherwell if he considered himself to be an “abstract symbolist” Motherwell curtly replied, “No. An existentialist” (CW p. 217). It was precisely to bring this existential perspective to the painting that Motherwell saw as the central problem the commission posed. Even at such a large scale, he wanted with it to “strike a personal note, the note of the human presence…of a twentieth-century solitary individual” (Journal p. 69, ellipses in the original).
Motherwell’s existentialism was not something he came to late or only under the difficult circumstances that faced him in 1974. In a 10 November 1956 letter to an otherwise unidentified person named “John,” Motherwell expressed his position in detail. The letter is worth quoting at some length:
I believe profoundly in Kierkegaard’s three stages, aesthetic, ethico-religious, and religious; that art is the first, the world of sensuous feeling, that the aesthetic can embody ethical decisions, but not reach altogether the ethical or the religious…as Kierkegaard says, “it is one thing to think and another to exist in what is thought”…K. is also right when he says existence is (and only is) choosing, and living out the choice; he is right when he says an artist’s (or aesthete’s life) [sic] is boredom, passion, immediacy, despair—because it doesn’t make ethical choices, but is neutral; but also is a real existence, in choosing oneself as object…that real thought can only be real (or transcendent) in the absurd paradox (CW p. 111).
The theme of reconciliation takes on a rich meaning when read through the lens of Motherwell’s existentialism. Reconciliation in its original sense is very much of an individual matter. It is a restoration to friendship after a period of enmity or disaffection, a way of reestablishing bonds that have been broken. To the extent that it involves apology and forgiveness as its prerequisites, it involves the recognition and acknowledgment of imperfection in oneself and the other to whom one is reconciled. It is a highly personal moment within a cycle that runs from affection to disaffection and back to affection, always with the possibility that the cycle will repeat. Each stage of this cycle implies a moment of inwardness, of a self-awareness through which one grasps oneself in one’s way of projecting oneself into one’s own world as well as into the worlds of others, and on that basis, makes a conscious choice of how to relate oneself to oneself and to the other. To reconcile with someone is above all to choose in Kierkegaard’s sense of ethical choice—to commit oneself to the choice that rejects enmity and instead accepts that other person once again into an amicable relationship.
The reconciliation Motherwell had in mind in 1974 extends the meaning of reconciliation from its core meaning of friendship restored to a more general meaning of bringing into agreement two opposed sides of a contradiction. This more general form of reconciliation follows the pattern of ethical choice as well, inasmuch as it depends on self-awareness and a choice to which one commits oneself: one becomes aware of oneself as necessarily finite, chooses to accept that fact rather than deny it or ignore it or otherwise wish it away, and lives out the consequences of that choice. What is at stake isn’t an interpersonal relationship, though, but a relationship to one’s basic existence as such. The “human presence” Motherwell wished to convey with his large painting thus wasn’t simply the presence of an individual as such, but an individual as universal-singular—that is to say, the individual subjected to a universal situation or condition which he or she experiences, and even chooses, through the contingencies of his or her own existence and by virtue of the possibilities, unique to him or her, that those contingencies make possible. The individual as universal-singular is the individual whose universal situation is experienced through the accidents of his or her concrete situation, while at the same time, his or her concrete situation is made intelligible by his or her universal situation. The subject of the Reconciliation Elegy is the universal situation of human finitude as read through the concrete situation of the singular individual confronting and accepting that finitude. By couching reconciliation in these terms, by recognizing in himself both the reality of the universally human situation of finititude as well as the particularly individual possibility of choosing to accept that situation as his own, Motherwell in effect intended the Reconciliation Elegy to express the universal in the singular, and the singular in the universal. The juxtaposition of black and white, as signifying the juxtaposition of life and death, signifies the universal existential situation, while the quasi-spontaneous gesturality with which the black forms are rendered conveys the concrete immediacy of individual experience. For the individual reimagined as the universal concrete, Motherwell’s dark forms are like witnesses whose imposing presence invite reflection; they are black mirrors in which one can see oneself, as a particular individual, in the broader image of the generality common to all the other individuals sharing the same nature.
The “No” That Is a “Yes”
If reconciliation represents a choice at an individual level, how does it scale up to address itself to the larger civilizational threats Motherwell identified? How, in other words, does one reconcile oneself to the impersonal forces and anonymous actors responsible for the Damocles swords of nuclear annihilation and environmental destruction hanging over humanity? Can one, or should one?
Motherwell suggests that the tragedy of world-historical events is to be opposed by the individual affirming him- or herself in the irreducibly individual experience of “spontaneity and ecstasy”…[which] both have as final enemies authoritarianism and death” (Journal p. 77). There is an echo here not only of existentialism, with its at least implicit acknowledgment of the irreducible value of the individual person as universal-singular, but of the Surrealism that had attracted Motherwell in the 1940s. André Breton had always insisted on the fundamental legitimacy of the claims of the individual, with the richness of his or her desires and imagination, against what is dehumanizing and devaluing in the necessarily restrictive structures of organized social life. In his interview with Wagener, Motherwell correctly pointed out that Surrealism had an “essentially existentialist” aspect to it to the extent that it sought out “the essence of the nature of existence” beyond abstractions and “rhetoric” (CW 218). It is this existential aspect that is expressed most clearly in Surrealism’s insistence on the concrete freedom of the individual as fostered by, and manifested through, the immediacy of affective life and the spontaneous creativity of the analogical and associative play of the imagination.
Although in choosing reconciliation one in effect chooses to say “yes” where previously one had said “no,” there is in the idea that the “spontaneity and ecstasy” of the person as universal-singular can assert themselves against the dehumanizing forces of a technologically advanced civilization an implicit negation. Reconciliation here may, as its opening move, entail a “no” as well as a “yes”—a refusal as well as an affirmation. That refusal is the refusal that stands and says “no” to the inhumanity of human-inflicted degradation and suffering and in denying it, affirms the dignity due to the person in his or her concrete individuality. It is an affirmation that confronts the collective death wish history seems to embody and in reply, simply says “no.”
This refusal is, paradoxically, a form of affirmation. It implies an acknowledgment of the larger situation within which one lives, but is an acknowledgment that is realized in part through a rejection of the unnecessary lethality that that situation threatens, even if the necessity of death, as a universal condition, is itself accepted. It is not a protest against the human condition as such—the condition in which death is a necessary part of life—but rather a protest against human folly and hubris as amplified by institutional power and the inevitable demands of social life. It is an ethical choice in that it is based on the recognition of the universal in the individuals we live among, and on whose behalf we refuse to asset to the self-inflicted traumas of this or any other age. Refusal in this sense is a declaration of solidarity, a reconciliation with others, a refusal that affirms.
Works cited:
Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).
Robert Motherwell with Robert Bigelow and John E. Scofield Robert Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy: A Journal of Collaboration Presented by E.A. Carmean, (Rizzoli, 1980).
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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