Daniel Barbiero
May 2026
Robert Motherwell in Mexico
In 1941 Robert Motherwell left New York to spend six months in Mexico, where he worked closely with the European Surrealists Roberto Matta Echaurren and Wolfgang Paalen. His time in Mexico was relatively brief, but it was to have a lasting effect on his art. After he returned to New York he took the principles and techniques he had experimented with in Mexico and began to develop them into what would, in effect, become the foundation of his subsequent artmaking. He was an especially articulate artist who was willing to give expression to his ideas in lectures, interviews, and letters, all of which give us a view – to be sure, one not without controversy — into this formative period not only for Motherwell personally, but for the development of postwar American abstract painting out of Surrealist automatism, a development in which he played a supporting role. At the same time, we get a view into the uneasy relationship between an artist and his influences.
The First New York Period and the Discovery of Automatism
Motherwell was relatively new to painting when he got to New York in the fall of 1940, although he was not entirely inexperienced. His background originally was in philosophy, a bachelor’s degree in which he had obtained from Stanford University in 1937. He subsequently went to Harvard for graduate work, enrolling in the department of philosophy. The focus of his studies was on Delacroix’s journals, research for which brought him to Europe in 1938-1939. While in Paris he took up painting, studied briefly at the Académie Julien, and had his first solo exhibit. After teaching art at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1939-1940, he moved to New York and enrolled in Columbia University’s Department of Art History, where he studied with Meyer Schapiro. It was through Schapiro that Motherwell was introduced to Kurt Seligmann, one of the European Surrealists then in wartime exile in New York; Motherwell became a regular visitor to Seligmann’s studio.
Meeting Seligmann was crucial for Motherwell; so too was his attendance at one of the lectures British Surrealist Gordon Onslow-Ford presented at the New School for Social Research in January and February 1941. It was there that Motherwell appears to have been introduced to the technique that would become foundational for his artistic practice: automatic drawing. As Motherwell recalled in a 19 October 1988 letter to Ted Lindberg,
[T]he lecture was a very good one, intelligent, clear, and filled with an enthusiasm that bordered on Onslow-Ford’s sense of an ultimate revelation. He did demonstrate automatism on the blackboard […] Onslow-Ford began with lines seemingly at random and very rapidly drawn. At a certain critical moment, with the addition of several more lines, to my stupefaction, there appeared a typical classical de Chirico […] (CW, p. 290).
It was at the Onslow-Ford lecture that Motherwell met Roberto Matta, a Surrealist of the younger generation who would become a close friend and artistic mentor during the early ‘40s. In the letter to Lindberg Motherwell remembered Matta as “an electrifying personality […] [who] carried an optimism, a sense of infinite possibilities of everything still to be done” and as someone who was “also extremely generous and impartial in his artistic counsel.” (CW, p. 290) It was a generosity that would come into full play during Motherwell’s time in Mexico.
To Mexico
The idea of a trip to Mexico originated with Kurt Seligmann. He and his wife, who had fled Paris in September 1939 on account of the war, were considering a move there. They proposed a trip to Mexico in the summer of 1941 and invited Motherwell and Barbara Reis, another one of Seligmann’s students, to accompany them. The Seligmanns called off their plans to emigrate because of difficulties in obtaining funds from Europe; as a consequence, Matta and his American wife took the Seligmanns’ place and joined Motherwell and Reis on the trip to Mexico that June. The group settled in Taxco, where Matta was what Motherwell later described as “temporarily and somewhat unwillingly” a mentor. In a 1967 interview with Sidney Simon, Motherwell acknowledged that during three months they spent together in Mexico, Matta gave him a “ten-year education in surrealism” (CW, p. 159). Motherwell began experimenting with automatic drawing, a method he would later adapt for the creation of his mature abstract works and, as he reported in a letter to the Seligmanns, was beginning to paint in a new, flatter style that he thought “will lead to some good things.” Advances in his art aside, the reality of life in Taxco that summer appears to have been uncongenial for Motherwell. His correspondence to the Seligmanns indicates his general unhappiness with conditions even if Matta, by contrast, seemed to thrive there (Sawin, p. 186). For Motherwell there may have been an element of disappointment; as he recalled to Brian Robertson in a 1965 interview, one reason for going to Mexico – in addition to his wanting to be near Matta — was because he thought of it as an ersatz Mediterranean when the real thing was inaccessible during wartime (CW, p. 144).
Paalen and the “New Image”
At the end of the summer the Mattas and Reis returned to New York. Motherwell stayed on to work with Wolfgang Paalen, whom he met in Mexico City through Matta. Paalen was another European Surrealist in exile. Originally from Austria, he and his wife, the artist Alice Rahon, joined the Surrealist group in Paris in 1935. They left Paris in May 1939 for the Pacific Northwest and after a period studying native cultures there, settled in Mexico the following September. Although Paalen had been part of the Parisian Surrealist group around André Breton, in Mexico he became a dissident who maintained a belief in some of Surrealism’s main tenets, particularly its faith in the creative, associative powers of the imagination, but rejected others. Crucially, one of the tenets he rejected was the belief in pure psychic automatism as enough in itself for producing art, along with the related belief in a Freudian unconscious. Consequently, Paalen declared his independence from Breton’s Surrealism and formed a small artistic circle around himself which included Rahon and Onslow-Ford as well as the American Edward Renouf and the Swiss Eva Sulzer. The circle became known as the Dyn Group, after the name of the journal he produced between 1942 and 1944.
Motherwell met with Paalen daily, painted in his studio, and eventually became involved as a translator from French to English for DYN. We can get a sense of what kind of perspective on Surrealism Motherwell was exposed to with Paalen through the latter’s statement of principles in the essay “The New Image,” which appeared in spring 1942 in the first issue of DYN. In regard to automatism, Paalen asserted that it
can be no more than incantatory technique, and not creative expression. The verbal flow of the poet and the kaleidoscopic flow of the painter, emancipated in automatism, are nothing but raw material – and it is the great merit of surrealism to have taught us that it is this (and not the exterior world) that is the true raw material of the poet and the painter. But in order that there may be a poem or a painting, language must become articulate.” (Farewell, p. 42. Emphases in the original.)
Automatism, in other words, can be useful as a technique for finding the raw material of a poem or painting, but by itself, it isn’t enough. Conscious craft – language becoming articulate – must be brought to bear in order to turn what automatism generates into a finished composition.
Surrealist painting at this time was divided between representationalism, exemplified by the work of Dali and Magritte, and the non-representationalism of a Tanguy or Gorky. Paalen came down on the side of the latter, claiming that
The true value of the image, through which artistic activity is connected with human development, lies in its capacity to project a new realization which does not have to be referred for its meaning to an object already existing […] [it] does not depend upon its capacity to represent, but upon its capacity to prefigure, i.e., upon its capacity to express potentially a new order of things. (Farewell, p. 52. Emphases in the original.)
In sum, Paalen’s “new image” would be embodied in a non-representational art that may begin with automatism, but that requires conscious crafting for its completion. It was an idea that would prove to be especially fruitful in the coming years — as well as a later point of controversy.
New York Again, and “Plastic Automatism”
Motherwell returned to New York toward the end of 1941. By that time his attitude toward painting had changed from what it had been when he first encountered Surrealism. As he acknowledged in a letter of 3 December 1941, he had “had many philosophical prejudices” against Surrealism, but “they [the Surrealists] seemed to understand…a solution to those problems of how to free the imagination in concrete terms, which are so baffling to an American.” As a result, he came to accept “surrealist automatism [as] the basis of my painting […] (The philosophical objections I once held against them no longer seem very relevant […]” (CW, p. 17). The letter seems to give evidence that the combined effect of Onslow-Ford’s lecture, Motherwell’s studies with Seligmann, and most importantly his work in Mexico with Matta and Paalen, had produced something of a conversion experience. We can see the early 1940s, during which he took up again with Matta and participated with a younger generation of artists in experimenting with painterly techniques based on automatism, as a time when Motherwell assimilated and refined that experience, taking in particular what he learned in Mexico and shaping it into a set of artistic principles. He gave an early expression to these principles in “The Modern Painter’s World,” a talk given at Mount Holyoke College in August 1944.
The talk, which covered a number of topics, including the role of the artist in a society organized around a market economy, is most interesting for Motherwell’s remarks on automatism and its role in painting, and for his statement of principles concerning the contemporary function of painting in general. Motherwell’s basic philosophical position on painting was that it is a “medium in which the mind can actualize itself […] in color and in space […] It is the pattern of choices made, from the realm of possible choices, which gives a painting its form.” Choice, material medium, and form: these were the fundamental elements of Motherwell’s conception of what is essential to painting. Hence his criticisms of what he considered to be Surrealism’s devaluing of the aesthetic in favor of the “animal drives of the id” and its tendency to “renounce the conscious ego altogether.” As for pure automatism, Motherwell noted that “the unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any expression’s form.” And yet he did see a role for automatism as an opening gambit and initial source of artistic material that subsequently must be shaped by conscious choices informed by the work’s evident aesthetic demands. It was this idea of a limited or initial automatism, stripped of the Freudian implications it carried for the orthodox Surrealists and followed by the execution of deliberate aesthetic choices, that he introduced as “plastic automatism.” He offered it as a method that could be used to “invent new forms,” and claimed it was “one of the twentieth century’s greatest formal inventions” (CW, pp. 31-34). It was a position he would hold to throughout his career.
The Anxiety of Influence
The provenance of Motherwell’s “plastic automatism” would become a matter of dispute. Specifically, how much of it was owed to Paalen? To be sure, plastic automatism does seem to represent a refinement and further development of Paalen’s idea of automatism as a technical tool, freed from Freudian overtones, that by itself would be insufficient for creating art. And it had been reported that Motherwell had brought the first issue of DYN, which contained Paalen’s “The New Image” essay, with him to Matta’s workshops and “expounded at length on Paalen’s theories” (Farewell, p. 18). Motherwell certainly was familiar with Paalen’s essay – indeed, he had been the one to translate it into English. Yet in later years he rejected the idea that plastic automatism was something he picked up from Paalen and claimed that the transformation of standard Surrealist “psychic automatism” into “plastic automatism” was his own innovation. On this issue, his pointed letter of 23 February 1970 to the art historian and critic Irving Sandler is worth quoting at length:
My substituting “plastic” for “psychic” was my own idea. To put it the other way around, Paalen had no “influence” on me. Our relationship was essentially his giving me a great deal of information about the origins and nature of surrealism, which was a topic that then fascinated me, and in return, I gave him equally factual information about contemporary philosophy in the English-speaking world, particularly the American pragmatic tradition of James, Pierce [sic], and Dewey, and also of Russell and Whitehead. (My intellectual relationship with Matta at that time was parallel, but Paalen did not find Matta simpatico.) I never particularly liked Paalen’s painting, nor did he particularly like my painting, which was then literally in its first months of development, i.e., I began painting full time at precisely, but by coincidence, the same moment that I met Paalen. What we did do, as then isolated western intellectuals in Mexico, was to encourage each other in our various aspirations and with our various bits of knowledge and intuitions […]What Paalen, Matta, Onslow-Ford, and I shared—despite our profound characterological and national differences—was an intense enthusiasm about how much there was to explore in those years of the end of the Depression and the Second World War […] For objective social reasons I prefer to think that our joint enthusiasms were based on possibilities that surrealism suggested to us, which we transformed our various ways according to our talents and temperaments…(CW, pp. 182-183)
Had Paalen really been of no influence? Sandler in his memoir stated that Motherwell downplayed the nature of his association with Paalen, portraying it as a more or less equal relationship between colleagues rather than one between Paalen as master and Motherwell as apprentice. In Sandler’s opinion, Motherwell was in the habit of distorting history in order to exaggerate his own role in the development of postwar American abstract painting. Sandler reported that in personal conversation Motherwell expressed an insecurity about his art; although Sandler doesn’t say so, Motherwell’s claims of originality may have reflected a way to compensate for that insecurity. (Sandler, pp. 89-90). It may also have been his way of coming to terms with what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence – the anxiety that arises when we become too aware of our inevitable indebtedness to the forerunners and models on which our own work is based. Such anxiety may produce a reflexive denial that serves as a necessary step in the process of taking the given and transforming it into something of our own. Motherwell seems to have been given to reflecting on his past; perhaps denying the extent of Paalen’s influence – repressing the trace of this other in himself – was his way of understanding what was essential to his own practice, and what constituted his own originality. We can only speculate.
In the end, what remains indisputable is that thanks to his time in Mexico, Motherwell did serve as a bridge between Paalen and the younger American artists who would go on to develop postwar abstraction. After he left Mexico, Motherwell kept up his connection with Paalen. “The Modern Painter’s World” appeared in the final issue of DYN in November 1944, and in 1945 Motherwell, as an editor of the Problems of Contemporary Art series, chose Paalen’s Form and Sense as the first book to be published. If art historian Dawn Ades is right that Paalen’s art and thought are the “missing link” between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, then Motherwell’s Mexican sojourn must count as one of the pivotal moments in American postwar painting.
References cited:
Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell, Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico, with an introduction by Dawn Ades (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012). Internal cites to Farewell.
Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford U Press, 1992). Internal cites to CW.
Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003). Internal cites to Sandler.
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Internal cite to Sawin.
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Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).
Link to Daniel Barbiero’s, As Within, so Without →