While students affiliated with the art history and studio art departments regularly venture to the Hood Museum of Art, most students admit that they have never visited the museum, or have only been inside very briefly.
That may be unfortunate because they may miss an opportunity to view the painting of an innovative twentieth-century American artist.
The most recent acquisition of the Modern and Contemporary Arts collection hangs in the main foyer of the second floor.
Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist piece titled "Chambre d'Amour" (1958) offers a wonderful example of work by the New York School of artists during the time their paintings were becoming widely accepted and admired by the general public.
A new school of thought
The New York School developed into a fortified group of starving artists, many of them immigrants, after the Second World War. As the devastation and damper of World War II spread its cold blanket over the European art world, the international center for arts migrated from Paris to New York.
The artists readily incorporated and built upon their European traditions based in three main schools of modern art -- namely the Cubist (such as Pablo Picasso), Surrealist (Salvador Dali) and Expressionist (Henry Matisse) traditions.
As they began to gel into a tangible group, they worked out of their European roots and created the first era of modern art to originate in the United States.
Members of the school, also known as abstract expressionists, included well-recognized figures such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Alexander Calder.
While each artist worked in a very distinctive style -- some completely abstract, others concentrating on the human figure or landscapes -- they all pushed modern art onto a new path.
A portrait of the artist
The Motherwell piece in the Hood offers a great example of the abstract vein of the New York School. The intellectualism associated with the group shines through in Motherwell's background.
As a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard University, Motherwell left Cambridge, Mass. and transferred to Columbia University in 1940 to study art history.
In the artistic and bohemian circles of Greenwich Village in New York where he lived, Motherwell started to develop as an artist.
He was especially attracted to automatism. Even in his early painting, the main themes of his work are apparent -- life and death, destruction and revolution.
Motherwell's work revolves around the intense emotional elements of his paintings and the controlled, sometimes sterile and imposing horizontal and vertical lines applied to a shallow, two-dimensional background.
Although his pictures are abstract, he emphasized that his subject matter was always specific. Critics who claim that a Motherwell piece is just a jumble of haphazardly applied strips of paint and color need to look closer.
"Elegy to the Spanish Republic," Motherwell's most famous series of works dating from 1948 to about 1952, used black bars and oval forms against white backgrounds to memorialize the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War.
The legacy of the Spanish Republic series is inherent in "Chambre d'Amour" (French for chamber of love). This painting, which followed the series, also uses dominant black and white forms.
Chamber of love
The Hood piece might be more appealing to students since it uses a wider palette of colors.
A strong blue vertical anchors the right side of the 66 x 91 inch canvas. An imposing black oval stands to the left.
Its central portions seem to be done with a more lacquered paint, giving the canvas an amoeba-shaped sheen that contrasts with the edges of the oval done in a matte paint.
Towards the upper right section of the black oval, one notices that the bare canvas is nearly discernible under a thin layer of paint. Motherwell may have scratched out the paint or reworked this section numerous times.
The painting process was his journey of exploration.
A close inspection of the layers of colors presents a puzzling question: was the black applied to the entire canvas before the other colors were added?
Trying to retrace the process of creation is fascinating once the viewer starts to see more than splotches of color. Why did he use the mustard tone so passionately at the top center of the canvas?
His evident brush strokes and thick application of paint give the canvas texture, movement and density. Motherwell's painting is very gestural in that the movement of the artist can still be traced in the brush stroke and thickness of his materials.
The areas where two colors come together offer the most perplexing, beautiful areas on the canvas.
As Motherwell's contemporary, Pollock once advised those who wish to learn to appreciate modern art. He said, "They should not look for, but look passively -- and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for."
Motherwell's work and that of the New York School may not suit everyone's tastes. But a look at this piece that is so accessible to the Dartmouth community offers a great insight into American modernism.
With works such as Motherwell, Americans finally started to create their own history of art outside the European tradition.
