Capriccio

A painter and printmaker, Robert Motherwell, was also a prolific writer, who, as a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism in New York, introduced the use of the term in the United States. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Motherwell studied art at the Otis Art Institute, in Los Angeles, in 1926, and at the California School of Fine Arts, in 1932. He went on to study philosophy at Stanford University and Harvard, traveling several times to Europe. In 1940, Motherwell settled on the East Coast, primarily in New York, where he studied art history at Columbia University. Through the art historian, Meyer Schapiro, he was introduced to many European refugee artists and became particularly friendly with the exiled Surrealists, including André Breton, Matta Echaurren, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy. Motherwell had studied Sigmund Freud's approach to psychoanalysis and was strongly influenced by Surrealist theories of automatism, according to which a painting appeared to paint itself, evolving from the unconscious mind of the artist. Motherwell called his own approach to the creation of images and collages by free association "Plastic Automatism." In the 1950s and 1960s, much of his painting, inspired by his own personal emotions, was highly gestural and expressionist, but in the late 1960s, he changed his approach to what has become known as Color Field painting, manipulating pure color to produce abstract forms, seemingly devoid of personal emotion.

Capriccio is a work of Motherwell's transitional years. Painted in a small rented house in East Hampton, New York, in 1945, after he had left New York City, this work belongs to his small, "confined" compositions. Overcome by the loneliness and solitude of his new and rather isolated surroundings, Motherwell was deeply moved by a description of solitude by the Spanish artist, Francisco de Goya, who interpreted it as a condition that "makes room for observation." Motherwell became increasingly absorbed in a visual study of Goya's works, and throughout his life, he amassed an extensive collection of books on Goya, including André Malraux's Saturn: An Essay on Goya and Folke Nordstrom's Goya, Saturn and Melancholy. A reproduction of Goya's painting Saturno devorando a sus hijos (Saturn Eating His Own Child) was one of many Goya images Motherwell pinned to his painting wall. Goya's disconcerting scenes and visual fantasies appealed to Motherwell as unfanthomable yet specific representations of things that cannot be foreseen, things that are not seen "except at night and in the dark." The Huntington owns a complete set of the 80 prints of Goya's Los Caprichos (1794-1798) which are accompanied by explanatory legends by Goya himself, elucidating the enigmatic etchings. In contrast to the capricious spirit of several early paintings marked by improvisational free form, Motherwell's Capriccio bears a strong connection to the representations of melancholy and menace that mark Goya's Caprichos -- both in the purely emotional handling of the small, compressed space and in the execution which is marked by a mixture of control and fantasy, a somber scale of colors, and a sense of captured circumstance.