Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941 – 1991 Volume 3 - Flipbook - Page 84
c94
c94
Sea Lion with Red Stripe
1959
Oil and pasted paper on board
29 x 23 in. (73.7 x 58.4 cm)
inscriptions
Recto, upper right: RM 59
artist’s studio number
c59-5091
present owner
Bennington College
provenance
Bennington College, Vt., 1960
solo exhibitions
Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, Mass., 1963, cat. no. 12,
illus. n.p.
New Gallery, Charles Hayden Memorial
Library, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, 1963.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
November 1972 (traveling), cat. no. 18,
illus. p. 66.
72
collages
group exhibitions
Williams College Museum of Art,
Willamstown, Mass., 1991.
references
Motherwell in Smith College Museum
of Art exh. cat. 1963, n.p.; Arnason
1977b, p. 54; Arnason 1982, p. 54;
Journal of the Print World 1991, illus.
p. 28; Caws 1996b, p. 157.
comments
The collage element near the center
of this work is from a package of Sea
Lion brand sardines. In the catalogue
for his 1963 Smith College exhibition,
Motherwell wrote of this work, “Painted
in Canada. The label is from a
Canadian sardine can. Only the ‘Sea’
shows in it. I tore off ‘Lion’: it didn’t fit.
(Generally, in collages I only use things
that happen to be in the studio. They
represent familiarity and in a certain
way domesticity)” (Motherwell in
Smith College Museum of Art exh. cat.
1963, caption to plate 12).
c95
c95
Untitled
1959
Gouache, pasted papers, and ink on
paperboard
27⅞ x 21¾ in. (70.8 x 55.2 cm)
inscriptions
Recto, upper right: RM 59
artist’s studio number
c59-527
present owner
Dedalus Foundation
provenance
Dedalus Foundation, 1991
solo exhibitions
Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles,
2005, cat. no. 16.
group exhibitions
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse,
N.Y., 2002 (traveling), color illus. p. 38.
references
Bennett 2003, sec. F, p. 4.
comments
The text on the piece of red paper at
the lower center of this work is from
Book 9, Chapter 16 of Herodotus’s
Histories. It reads: “Nothing in human
life is more to be lamented than that a
wise man should have so little influence.” Fragments of this same text
appear in other collages (see also c96–
c98). This particular printing of the
Herodotus text was designed by
Paul Rand and published as part of a
Great Ideas of Western Man series
issued by the Container Corporation
of America. (A collage element with
the text “Container Corporation
of America” appears in another of
the collages that contain this quote;
see c96.)
This work also has strong stylistic
affinities with a contemporaneous
large-scale painting, Untitled (p192).
