Robert Motherwell Interview from 1989

Posted by Lisa Kehler on October 2, 2013

From September 27 to January 5, the Guggenheim is exhibiting Robert Motherwell: Early Collages. This exhibition presents a focused exploration of Motherwell’s papiers collés and related works on paper from the first decade of his career. In 1989, Robert Enrigt had the occasion to sit down with Motherwell to talk about his work. While the entire conversation is illuminating, insightful, and frankly, quite fascinating, the final segment of the interview offers a beautiful synopsis to Motherwell’s raison d’être.

I want to end with a large question. Why does art matter to you?

The importance of it is to make one feel less mad, less alienated and less ill-at-ease in the universe. I mean, if one hears an early divertimento by Mozart, one immediately feels, “Yes, I’m sane, I understand what he’s talking about, there’s another person in the world whose feelings match mine, I’, not some isolated creature wandering around in a foreign, uncomfortable, frightening, unreal universe.”

Basically my interest is to communicate and to have a medium that’s as expressive in its complexity as is a human being. It’s an inexhaustible problem, and also an inexhaustible interest. What could really be more interesting, or in the end more ecstatic than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you’ve made and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart, with nothing in between?

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