Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 2 - Flipbook - Page 22
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taken by John D. Schiff when it was
installed at the First Papers of Surrealism
exhibition in October 1942. The work
is known only from this photograph
and from its presence in the background of a photographic portrait of
Marcel Duchamp by Arnold Newman
taken at the same exhibition. (The
white lines that intersect it in the photograph are parts of the labyrinthine
web of twine that Marcel Duchamp
installed throughout the gallery, which
was referred to in the exhibition catalogue as his twine, and is now called
Sixteen Miles of String.)
Motherwell wrote about this painting in a letter of October 13, 1980, to
the art historian Yve-Alain Bois: “At
the same time there was something
about Mondrian’s painting that penetrated my heart, so much so that in the
famous huge Surrealist show installed
by Marcel Duchamp called The First
Papers of Surrealism there is an installation photograph showing a very
Mondrianesque painting in that show
that has puzzled many art historians in
later years, not realizing it was painted
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paintings on ca n v a s an d p a n e l
by me. If the design is somewhat
Mondrianesque, the colors are not at
all.” Motherwell further remarked that
when Mondrian was asked what he
thought of this painting, he “replied to
the effect that he thought it was a very
good picture but ‘too tragic,’ which I
was later to learn meant, in Mondrian’s
eccentric vocabulary, ‘too personal’ or
‘too particular’ ” (Motherwell 1992,
p. 238). The catalogue for the exhibition reproduced a different work,
Recuerdo de Coyoacán (p8), then titled
El Miedo de la Obscuridad.
We do not know whether this work
still exists in the form illustrated here.
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The Sentinel
Alternative Title: Painting (?)
1942
Oil and graphite on canvas
33⅞ x 41⅞ in. (86 x 106.4 cm)
inscriptions
Recto not signed, not dated
Verso: studio, 33 W. 8, N.Y.C.
Verso: Robert Motherwell «The
Sentinel» NYC October 1942
artist’s studio number
p42-1460
present owner
Dedalus Foundation
provenance
Art of This Century, 1943; Robert
Motherwell, 1945; Dedalus Foundation,
1991
group exhibitions
Norlyst Gallery, New York, 1943,
cat. no. 74.
Art of This Century, New York,
May 1943, cat. no. 27, as Painting (?).
El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2009,
color illus. p. 193.
references
Mattison 1985b, pp. 60, 91, 177, 206,
illus. n.p. (fig. 46); Mattison 1987, p. 41;
Peggy Guggenheim Collection exh. cat.
2003, pp. 89, 353.
comments
This painting is related to a large
untitled drawing (ca. 1942) by
Motherwell (see fig. 13 in volume 1) on
the theme of the “hours of the day,”
which was suggested to Motherwell by
Matta. That drawing was in turn a
study for an installation of various
object-images that Motherwell planned
to mount at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, but which
was never realized. As in the untitled
drawing and in the unrealized gallery
installation, certain forms in The
Sentinel have quasi-narrative overtones.
The irregular, vertical striped form on
the left side of the painting, for example,
is related to a form that Motherwell
described on his untitled drawing as
“The Threshold (Spanish Door),”
