Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 3 - Flipbook - Page 71
c71
c71
Ash Wednesday
Alternative Titles: Collage, in Tobacco
and Blue; Collage in Tobacco and Blue:
Ash Wednesday
1957
Oil, pasted papers, charcoal, and ink
on board
20 x 15 in. (50.8 x 38.1 cm)
inscriptions
Recto, upper right [partially torn away]:
Motherwell [1]957
Verso: Robert Motherwell 1957
“Collage, in Tobacco + Blue”
Verso: “Ô, moi qui connais
l’amertume” Stéphane Mallarmé
(“Oh I, who know bitterness”)
artist’s studio number
c57-523
present owner
Delaware Art Museum. F. V. du Pont
Acquisition Fund and partial gift of the
Dedalus Foundation, 1998
no. 6; Caracas, cat. no. 61; Bogotá, cat.
no. 61; Mexico City, cat. no. 6.
provenance
Dedalus Foundation, 1991; Delaware
Art Museum, Wilmington, 1998
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington,
1999.
solo exhibitions
New Gallery, Bennington College, Vt.,
1959, cat. no. 18.
Galleria Odyssia, Rome, 1962, cat.
no. 12, as Collage in Tobacco and Blue:
Ash Wednesday.
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,
1965, cat. no. 5.
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
Robert Motherwell:Works on Paper,
September 1965 (circulating), illus. n.p.
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1967 (circulating), Buenos Aires, cat.
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, 1977.
group exhibitions
Flint Institute of Arts, Mich., 1958,
cat. no. 13.
Pace Gallery, New York, 1974.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo,
1997 (traveling), cat. no. 59, color illus.
p. 122.
Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany,
1997, color illus. p. 63.
references
Sozanski 1999, sec. F, p. 11, illus. sec. F,
p. 11.
comments
This work was executed on Ash
Wednesday, which fell on March 6 in
1957. The title also refers to T. S. Eliot’s
poem by the same name, which contains a sense of bitterness similar to
that in Motherwell’s inscription of the
lines by Mallarmé on the verso. The
Mallarmé poem actually reads: “Est-il
moyen, ô Moi qui connais l’amertume”
(Is there a way, O Self who has known
bitterness).
Motherwell discussed the genesis
of this collage in a 1969 interview with
Arthur Cohen: “I have one collage
called Ash Wednesday and it was done
one Wednesday night after I was
teaching in the evening at Hunter and,
I think probably the first year I was
teaching there, and many of the girls
had a marked smudge on their forehead
and in my absentminded way for awhile
co lla ges
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