Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 2 - Flipbook - Page 14
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La Belle Mexicaine (Maria)
solo exhibitions
New Gallery, Bennington College, Vt.,
1959, cat. no. 2, as Mexican Portrait.
p. 251, as La Belle Mexicaine; Pleynet
1998, p. 93, as La Belle Mexicaine;
Wentrup 2001, p. 45, illus. (fig. 8).
Alternative Titles: Mexican Portrait;
La Belle Mexicaine; Maria (Emilia
Ferreira y Moyers)
1941
Oil on canvas
29½ x 23¾ in. (74.9 x 60.3 cm)
Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City,
1991 (traveling), cat. no. 1, color illus.
p. 39, as Maria (Emilia Ferreira y
Moyers).
comments
The subject of this portrait is Maria
Emilia Ferreira y Moyers, whom
Motherwell met on his way to Mexico
in June 1941 and married in August
1942. A photograph in the Sidney Janis
Gallery archives, which was taken at
Motherwell’s 1959 Bennington College
exhibition, is inscribed on the back in
an unknown hand: “Pic of Maria
Summer ’41 in Mexico La Belle
Mexicaine First serious oil ptg.”
This information no doubt came
from Motherwell.
This work is the only oil painting
Motherwell is known to have done during the six months he spent in Mexico
that year, which included three months
in Taxco with his close friend and mentor, the Chilean painter Matta (Roberto
Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren,
1911–2002). The overpainted, incised
date on the recto of the canvas indicates
that Motherwell began to work on it
within days of his arrival in Mexico
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inscriptions
Recto, upper right, incised [painted
over]: [Motherwell 14 June 1941]
Recto, upper right [painted over]:
[M][illegible]
Recto, lower left: Motherwell
Verso (on horizontal crossbar):
Motherwell #1
artist’s studio number
p41-1610
present owner
Dedalus Foundation
provenance
Dedalus Foundation, 1991
2
paintings on can v a s an d p a n e l
references
Arnason 1966a, illus. p. 25 (fig. 1), as
La Belle Mexicaine; Cooney 1968, p. 22,
illus. n.p. (pl. 4), referred to in text
and in illus. erroneously as Portrait of
Maria/La Bella Mexicana; O’Hara
1975, p. 70, as La belle méxicaine;
Mattison 1985a, pp. 91–93, illus. p. 92
(fig. 8); Mattison 1985b, pp. 55–58,
64, 73, 100, illus. n.p. (fig. 23), referred
to in text and in illus. as La Belle
Mexicaine; Mattison 1987, pp. 38–40,
51, 56, 79, illus. p. 48 (fig. 12), referred
to in text and in illus. as La Belle
Mexicaine; Mattison 1988, p. 185;
Pleynet 1989b, pp. 17–20, color illus.
p. 18; Manthorne 1990, p. 67, as La
Belle Mexicaine; Flam 1991, color illus.
n.p. (pl. 1); Pleynet 1991, p. 18, as La
Belle Mexicaine; Pleynet 1995, p. 102, as
Maria: la belle Mexicaine; Gilbert 1998,
City. He probably finished it in Taxco
sometime within the next two months.
Elements of the automatist painting
process with which this work began
are still clearly visible at the center of
the image, and the layering of automatist and figurative approaches may in
part have resulted from the different
times and places in which Motherwell
worked on the painting.
When first exhibited in 1959, the
painting was titled Mexican Portrait;
starting around 1966, Motherwell
favored La Belle Mexicaine as the title
(see Arnason 1966a), to which he subsequently added the subtitle Maria.
