Characterized by its careful, deliberate application of color, Open No. 25: In Blue with Variations, 1968, epitomizes the raw, evocative power encapsulated in Robert Motherwell’s acclaimed Open series. In these Opens—which predominantly engaged the artist between 1967 and 1974—the artist transmitted his expressive faculties through a compositional structure typified by its sublime economy of form. This visual clarity is embodied in the present work in the three-sided “U” shape, contoured by straight black and deep green lines, in the upper center of the painterly expanse: a motif which resurfaced, in different manifestations, throughout Motherwell’s oeuvre. While many of the Open works depict this articulation against a monochromatic background, the present work features a two-tone blue surface that is punctuated by a white horizontal line, further complicating the picture’s spatial indeterminacy. In their coalescence of the subjective gesture of Abstract Expressionism and the geometric formalism of Minimalism, Motherwell’s Opens are some of the most emotionally rich of his oeuvre, and a number of them are included in preeminent international collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

The genesis of the Open series was in Motherwell’s studio in 1967, when his curiosity was piqued by the resulting shapes of the back of a small painting leaned against the recto of a painted one. After outlining the smaller canvas in charcoal on the larger one, the artist inverted the ensuing compositions so that the rectangle was placed at the top of the surface; thus, according to Motherwell, “the series began as a ‘door’” but was “ultimately reversed into a ‘window.’”ⁱ Struck by the metaphorical possibilities of the “window,” and the relationship it evokes between the internality of emotions and the externality of the senses, the artist continued the Open series for almost two decades, until the early 1980s.

"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."
—Mary Ann Caws

Motherwell was initially unaware that the series had brought his career full circle: after more than a year of producing Opens, the artist rediscovered a painting from almost thirty years earlier—Spanish Picture with Window, 1941, Museum Art Museum of Fort Worth—in which he had depicted a remarkably similar “window” in the upper left hand corner of a field of color. Motherwell subsequently quipped, “There is no escape from one’s individuality!”ⁱⁱ

 

The notion of an open-ended application of color was also likely prompted by Motherwell’s deep admiration of Rafael Alberti’s 1948 poem cycle A la pintura, whose poetic invocations of color profoundly affected the artist. During the creation of Open No. 25, Motherwell had recently embarked on a four-year-long project, which would last until 1972, juxtaposing Alberti’s poems with his Open prints in his eponymous artist’s book. Of the six colors to which Alberti dedicated odes, three comprise Motherwell’s chosen palette for the present work—blue, the most prominent shade in A la pintura, as well as black and white. “Mainly, I use each color as simply symbolic:…blue for the sky and sea,” the artist elucidating, assigning metaphorical referents to the colors he employed. “I guess that black and white, which I use most often, tend to be the protagonists.”ⁱⁱⁱ

"Blue was; and then painted itself into Time.
How many blues make a Mediterranean?"
—Rafael Alberti

Moreover, the subtle interplay between the line and the symbolic faculty of cerulean, charcoal, and white evokes Joan Miró’s investigation into the graphic power of signs against intense, saturated fields of color. “Miró was the great painter of the generation after Picasso,” Motherwell espoused. “With those incomparably original, emptyish pictures, there was nobody close to him. His art had to do with improvisation, spontaneity, daring juxtaposition, imagery that was metaphorical, not literal. Abstract Expressionism had certain parallel aspirations…”^iv

 

Executed during a time when Minimalism had superseded Abstract Expressionism as the dominant force in the New York art world, Open No. 25 is demonstrative of an aesthetic convergence in Motherwell’s oeuvre. While this union betrays the artist’s awareness and openness to contemporaneous artistic trends, despite being a pioneer of the New York School, the work is a manifestation of far more than an exercise in reducing painting to its essence. Open No. 25 manifests Motherwell’s investigation of painting’s ability to simultaneously engage art history and explore philosophical inquiries. “In the end I realize that whatever ‘meaning’ that picture has is just the accumulated ‘meaning’ of ten thousand brush strokes, each one being decided as it was painted…as the accumulation of hundreds of decisions with the brush,” the artist himself elucidated. “But when you steadily work at something over a period of time, your whole being must emerge.”^v

 

ⁱ Robert Motherwell, “Statement of the Open Series” [1969], in Dore Ashton, ed., The Writings of Robert Motherwell, Berkeley, 2007, p. 244.
ⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 243.
ⁱⁱⁱ Robert Motherwell, quoted in An Exhibition of the Work of Robert Motherwell, exh. cat., Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, 1963, n.p.

^iv Robert Motherwell, quoted in “Pulling Together the Bits and Pieces of Motherwell’s Classic Modernism,” Chicago Tribune, January 27, 1985, online.
^v Robert Motherwell, quoted in Robert Motherwell, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Gallery, New York, Buffalo, 1983, p. 12.