Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 3 - Flipbook - Page 613
w542
Drunk with Turpentine No. 2
(Stephen’s Gate)
Alternative Title: Drunk with Turpentine
No. 2
1979
Oil and graphite on paper
28¾ x 22¾ in. (73 x 57.8 cm)
inscriptions
Recto, lower left: Motherwell/1979
artist’s studio number
p79-2244
present owner
Collection of the Modern Art Museum
Fort Worth. Museum purchase and gift
of the artist
provenance
Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, 1985
solo exhibitions
Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston, 1979, cat.
no. 114, as Drunk with Turpentine No. 2.
Visual Arts Museum, School of Visual
Arts, New York, 1983, as Drunk with
Turpentine No. 2.
Fort Worth Art Museum, September
1985, cat. no. 5, color illus. p. 17.
Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City,
1991 (traveling), cat. no. 21, color illus.
p. 85.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
1993.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
1994.
references
Fort Worth Art Museum Calendar
1985b, p. 2, illus. p. 5; Kutner 1985a,
sec. C, p. 3, illus. sec. C, p. 1; Sewell
1985, p. 21, erroneously as Drunk with
Turpentine No. 2 (Stephen’s Iron Gate);
Thierolf 2002, p. 318, illus. p. 318
(fig. 2), color illus. p. 319.
comments
In 1979 Motherwell produced a large
number of gestural paintings on paper
that would come to be known as the
Drunk with Turpentine series. The
majority of the works in this series were
executed with black oil paint on paper,
but the series gradually grew to include
a number of works painted in acrylic
and on canvas, panel, canvas board,
and Mylar. The oil-on-paper paintings
are all marked by a visible yellowish
halo around the black paint, which is
the result of the oil being absorbed by
the paper over time.
The title of the series was derived
from “Ebrio de trementina” (Drunk
with Turpentine), the ninth poem in
Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y
una canción desesperada (1924).
The numbering of the Drunk with
Turpentine series is inconsistent, with
many gaps between numbers and many
works left unnumbered. Many works
were signed and dated, but the series
numbers do not correspond to the
chronological sequence in which those
works were done.
Drunk with Turpentine No. 25 and
Drunk with Turpentine (w560 and
w588) were the first works from the
series to be shown in public, when they
were included in the artist’s March
1979 solo exhibition at the University
of Connecticut in Storrs; both works,
however, were still untitled at that
time. Motherwell appears to have first
assigned the Drunk with Turpentine
titles and numbers to works in the
series around the end of May 1979,
when Drunk with Turpentine No. 16
(w553) and Drunk with Turpentine No. 24
(w559) were sent with their present
titles to the Galerie Veith Turske,
Cologne, for exhibition at the Basel Art
Fair that June.
The first numbered work in the
Drunk with Turpentine series, Drunk
with Turpentine No. 1, 24 x 20 inches,
was consigned to Turske in October
1979, but its present whereabouts
are unknown, and there is no known
photographic record of it. We thus
begin our sequence with Drunk with
Turpentine No. 2 (Stephen’s Gate). The
parenthetical portion of this work’s title
was added at a later date, sometime
after Motherwell based a larger-scale
1981 painting, Stephen’s Gate (p1040),
on it. During the 1980s, Motherwell
would use many of the works from the
Drunk with Turpentine series as models
for large-scale paintings on canvas.
Motherwell later compared the
process of painting the Drunk with
Turpentine series to the making of the
Lyric Suite drawings in 1965: “Perhaps
I feel happiest when, during the creative
process, I simply let work ‘pour out,’ so
to speak, without critical intervention
or editing. . . . Fourteen years later, in a
larger format and with oil paint mixed
with turpentine to, roughly, the consistency of ink, I had a similar ‘outpouring,’ though I made less than a hundred
works which I call the Drunk with
w543
Turpentine series, a title that no matter
how evocative, is also literal. I might
add that I deeply regret the Occidental
prejudice against painting on paper,
which to me is the most sympathetic of
all painting surfaces” (Motherwell in
Arnason 1982, p. 221).
w543
Drunk with Turpentine No. 3
1979
Oil on paper
29 x 23 in. (73.7 x 58.4 cm)
inscriptions
Recto, lower right: Motherwell
7 March 79-E
artist’s studio number
d79-2275
present owner
Collection of Skip Paul and Van
Fletcher, Beverly Hills, Calif.
provenance
Dedalus Foundation, 1991; Skip Paul
and Van Fletcher, Beverly Hills, Calif.,
2000
solo exhibitions
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State
University, Kans., 1979.
comments
The letter E in the verso inscription
on this work refers to the letters from
A to E that Motherwell inscribed on
the rectos of five works from the Drunk
p a i n tin gs on paper and paperbo ard
601
