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An American in Paris
Continued from Page 16

confer on one or another of his current projects. As a founder of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940's, and one of its few survivors, Motherwell is now a historic personage - a subject of research and curiosity, and a primary source of information about other artists and the art-world figures from the now legendary days of the movement. Chez Motherwell in Greenwich, it seems, is always open house, with cars lined up in the driveway, food on the table, wine being poured, the telephone ringing, and somebody somewhere assiduously taking notes. 

Motherwell himself, though he only narrowly survived some recent surgery that left him very cautious about his health - he has had to give up drinking, and he is on a regimen of daily exercise and rest - seems to thrive on this hectic atmosphere. What is more amazing, it seems not to interfere with his work in the least. He is a more productive artist today than he has ever been before. There is a staff of assistants, to be sure, to help with the routine labors of the studios and the immense correspondence and paper work that a career on this scale entails. And there is the present Mrs. Motherwell, the artist's fourth wife - the German-born photographer, Renate Ponsold, who in the past year has herself had two exhibitions of her work, mostly portraits of well-known artists and writers - to preside over the logistics of this heavy traffic in visitors. It all adds up to the kind of celebrity life that many artists would find distracting and debilitating, but it clearly suits Motherwell, who is able to close the door on it when he enters the studio to work in isolation, usually from about 8 in the evening until 2 in the morning. 

The artist who is the focus of all this activity and attention was born in Aberdeen, Wash., in 1915, into a family with little interest in art. Motherwell's father was then a cashier in an Aberdeen bank, and by the time of his death in 1943 he had become a prominent figure in the San Francisco banking world. This is not the kind of background Americans expect their artists to have, and there are still people who find it hard to believe that the son of a banker, especially one as well-educated as Motherwell, could really become a serious and accomplished artist. (Motherwell's literary gifts are likewise regarded as an object of suspicion; American artists, unlike their French counterparts, are not expected to write well about what they are doing.) He grew up in California, and except for a summer trip to Europe with his family in 1936, he had never been East until he entered Harvard in 1937. When he returned from his one year in Paris in 1939, it was to the West Coast again, to teach at the University of Oregon. 

Although his first exhibition actually took place during his year in Paris - at the gallery of Raymond Duncan (Isadora's brother) - the pictures were all lost in shipment back to the States as the war was beginning, and Motherwell himself does not attribute any importance to them. His real life as an artist began in New York in the 1940's. At the University of Oregon, where he was still more or less committed to an academic career, someone suggested that he study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. It was Schapiro, a rarity at the time in being equally at home in the worlds of contemporary art and art-historical scholarship, who urged Motherwell in 1940 to abandon scholarship for painting, and it was through Schapiro that he met the French Surrealist artists and writers then beginning their wartime exile in New York. Already something of a Francophile with a deep interest in avant-garde French literature, Motherwell found this milieu both sympathetic and inspiring, and he entered it with enthusiasm.  

It was in this milieu, where a younger generation of American artists mingled with some of the established masters of Surrealism - the poet André Breton, often called the "pope" of Surrealism, among them - that the Abstract Expressionist movement was born. Through his contacts with this circle of exiles, Motherwell met his own American contemporaries - William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock and