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trajectories of unbridled feeling left unrevised by any afterthoughts or "corrections" -- and there are Motherwell paintings that are as carefully constructed as a Shaker cabinet, with each color and shape set down with a deliberate and studied attention. There is an emphatic vein of elegance in his work -- even a taste for that painterly cuisine the Abstract Expressionists are often alleged to have jettisoned from their art -- and there is a vein of Protestant restraint and understatement. He is thus the very opposite of the kind of modern painter who establishes a single image or idea as his trademark, and then sticks to it forever after. He is a brilliant colorist, especially in his collages, yet his most monumental paintings -- the "Elegies to the Spanish Republic" that have occupied him for decades and that will once again be the theme for his National Gallery painting -- are mainly black and white. Black, indeed, dominates whole areas of Motherwell's work, signaling the themes of tragedy and death. Much of his painting is austere in other ways. Some of the "Open" series, in which a very large picture surface saturated with a single color is punctuated with a single square-bottomed, windowlike U-shape, either painted or drawn in charcoal, draws close to the Minimal and Color-field painting of the past two decades, yet it rejects the anonymity and impersonality of that style by remaining very much in the autographic mode. He is at once a public painter, producing wall paintings on a heroic scale for public spaces, and a very private artist whose drawings and collages are a virtual diary of his personal life. In his younger days, in the 1940's, he seemed closer to Picasso; in recent years, he has drawn closer to Matisse. In confronting the freedom of choice that abstract art offers the artist today, Motherwell seems to want all of it -- the lyrical and the geometrical, what is most sensuous and what is most cerebral -- and one of the interests of a show like the Paris retrospective lies in the way it recapitulates in his own terms that "whole culture of modern painting" as he has come to perceive it. In returning this summer to Paris, where this modern art began, Motherwell has, in a sense, returned to his esthetic origins, for there is no art that pays a more protracted and intense homage to the spiritual home of Mallarme and Matisse than his.