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'Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head,' Motherwell once observed. 'It is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.'

Willem de Kooning. He contributed to VVV, one of the Surrealist magazines that sprang up in New York at the time, and was included in the exhibition called "First Papers of Surrealism," which Breton and Marcel Duchamp organized in 1942 as a benefit for French war relief. In 1943 he made his first collages – the medium in which he has produced some of his most -beautiful work – for a show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, "Art of This Century," and the next year he had a solo exhibition there. Three years later, he was included in the important "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art – by which time many of the Surrealists had returned to Paris, and the New York School, as the Abstract Expressionists came to be called, though still struggling for public acceptance of its unfamiliar art, was an artistic reality with its roots firmly planted here. 

The large oeuvre that Motherwell has produced in the 30-odd years since he began to paint seriously in the heady atmosphere of that wartime period obviously owes a great deal to the spirit, if not to the formal language, of the Surrealist milieu in which he came of age as an artist. Foremost among the Surrealist tenets that influenced Motherwell and some of his colleagues in the Abstract Expressionist group was a belief in the creative uses of automatism – the effort to suspend the dictates of consciousness during the process of creation in order to allow subconscious impulses and ideas a cardinal role in determining the artistic result. The Surrealists were firm believers in the poetry of the unconscious, and this belief met with a favorable response among American artists who were discovering in Freud and Jung a similar warrant for delving into the imagery of the id and the collective unconscious. Te paradox of much Surrealist painting lay in the fact that this belief in automatism was more honored in spirit than in practice - a good deal of the "unconscious" dream imagery of Surrealist painting was rendered with an academic meticulousness of representational detail that belied its "automatic" origins. It was the Americans - Motherwell among them - who carried the notion of automatism decisively into the realm of abstraction.

Yet this use of automatism, it is important to recall, was only one element that went into the making of Abstract Expressionist painting. The idea of a painter slinging paint onto the canvas in a swoon of unconscious inspiration, as if he were suffering some kind of divine seizure, may accord very nicely with romantic misconceptions about the artistic vocation, but it has very little to do with the way pictures are actually made. What is omitted from this romantic scenario of spontaneous inspiration is what the painter knows at the moment of creation, what art he has looked at and studied, what traditions he aspires to extend or supplant, and how much of his own experience he can bring into alignment with this burden of knowledge. "Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head," Motherwell once observed. "It is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss." Automatism was prized, then, for the new purchase it gave the artist on "his real subject," which was not the unconscious itself but the unknown possibilities of his own medium and what Motherwell once described as the "new structures" to be discovered in it.

The result, in Motherwell's case, has been an art of remarkable variety. There are Motherwell paintings that are all gesture and dash - 

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