Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 3 - Flipbook - Page 445
w60
Bull No. 1
solo exhibitions
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, March
1959, cat. no. 50 (shown in early state).
1958
Oil and Magna on paperboard
13 x 17⅝ in. (33 x 44.8 cm)
group exhibitions
Ecart Gallery, Geneva, 1984.
inscriptions
Recto, upper left, incised: RM
Le Consortium, Centre d’Art
Contemporain, Dijon, France, 1989.
present owner
A. L’H., Switzerland
Musée d’Ethnographie, Neuchâtel,
Switzerland, 1993.
provenance
Unknown owner, ca. 1959; [Kornfeld
und Klipstein, Bern, Switzerland,
June 11, 1969, lot 942]; unknown
owner, 1969; Ahrenberg collection;
[Sotheby Parke Bernet, Inc., London,
April 5, 1979, lot 434, illus.]; unknown
owner, 1979; A. L’H., Switzerland
comments
Motherwell painted this work in
Saint-Jean-de-Luz during the summer
of 1958, and reworked it the following
year. A black-and-white photograph of
an early version (Juley photo no. 155;
j0004946) shows the work with exposed
areas of white still visible near the
upper and lower right corners. By the
time the painting was first shown in
Motherwell’s solo exhibition at the
w60
Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1959,
he had extended the black paint to the
edge of the composition on the upper
right, as can be seen in a photograph of
the exhibition (see fig. 78 in volume 1).
Sometime later that year he made some
further revisions, extending the black
paint to the lower right edge of the picture and adjusting the contours of the
black area near the lower left corner
(Juley photo no. 111; j0004903).
Both Motherwell’s Bull series and
his Iberia series, also begun during the
summer of 1958, had their genesis in
his response to a bullfight he and Helen
Frankenthaler witnessed at the Plaza de
Toros Bayonne-Biarritz on August 3;
tickets to the same bullfight appear in
two collages, Cabaret No. 7 (c448) and
Cabaret No. 12 (c453). (For Motherwell’s
remarks about this experience, see
the Comments for Iberia No. 2, p177.)
The Bull and Iberia series are closely
related, in their predominant use of
black paint, in their evocation of bullfights and of Spain, and in their titles.
A large painting that came to be known
as Iberia No. 4 (p178) was originally
titled The Black Bulls of Europe; and
Bull No. 6, No. 7, and No. 8 eventually
became Iberia No. 15, No. 11, and No. 17,
respectively (see w69, w68, and w70).
p a i n tin gs on paper and paperbo ard
433
