North Carolina Museum of Art | Untitled

The Checkered Skirt—recently back on view in the Museum’s Modern and Contemporary galleries—belongs to a group of abstract figure paintings that Robert Motherwell created in the late 1940s through a deliberate process of trial and error. The artist would begin a painting without any preconceived idea of what the final composition should look like and would build up the surface as he continued to revise and edit the picture. Describing this process, Motherwell wrote, “I begin painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling . . . The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.”

This painting was first shown at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in March 1948 with the title The Checkered Skirt. However, Motherwell would often continue to work on a picture after it was exhibited. Recent scholarship suggests that the NCMA’s painting may have been shown two months later at the Kootz Gallery, but retitled (and reworked?) as Young Girl.

Photograph from the Robert Motherwell card file index at the Dedalus Foundation Archives

“Young Girl” is written on the back of the NCMA’s painting, though it does not appear to be in the artist’s handwriting. Motherwell’s archive includes a photograph of a painting titled Young Girl from 1947 (now unlocated). This prompted the question: Could this missing Motherwell be hiding under the NCMA’s painting?

To answer this question, the Museum’s conservators X-rayed our painting to see if another composition was hiding underneath. Though we did not find Young Girl, we did gain insight into how the artist developed his composition.

Motherwell wrote, “My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them—an X-ray would disclose crimes—layers of consciousness, of willing.” The layers buried under the surface of The Checkered Skirt show a process based on chance and intuition—what Motherwell would have called “quickened subjectivity.” Innumerable visions and revisions lead to a climactic “Eureka!” moment.

The X-ray reveals that the artist began with three rounded shapes. He continued to add abstract figural elements, or trim them by masking areas under the white overpaint (a bit like covering errors with Wite-Out.) A photograph of the painting under UV light shows that the artist covered over crescent shapes around the torso (perhaps arms?). Some of the major changes to The Checkered Skirt are still visible to the naked eye. Motherwell raised the figure’s head and shoulders and replaced rounded hips with an angular, houselike shape. The pigtailed silhouette in the final composition is built of precariously balanced elements.

After seeing Motherwell’s show at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in 1948, critic Clement Greenberg wrote that Young Girl was one of the most successful paintings in the exhibition, noting that the artist’s work is best when “architectural simplicity conceals toil and care.”

Robert Motherwell, The Checkered Skirt (The Young Girl), 1947, oil on fiberboard, 48 7/8 x 21 5/8 inches, Gift of the Olsen Foundation, 1958 (58.21.1). Shown under X-ray, ultraviolet light (UV), and natural light.

The NCMA’s analysis of The Checkered Skirt may not have found Young Girl hiding underneath, but it did reveal the time, labor, and consideration that went into building a seemingly effortless composition. I appreciate The Checkered Skirt more now that I’ve seen Motherwell’s mistakes. The mistakes show the care that went into crafting the final painting.

Laura Fravel is the Goodnight/Mellon curatorial research assistant at the NCMA. See her complete article with footnotes here.

Photo: Nick Pironio

The NCMA is celebrating Larry Wheeler’s 20th anniversary as director. This is an excerpt from the letter he sent to Museum staff today:

Good morning. Twenty years ago today, October 1, I entered the Museum as director. As our program has grown to meet expanding public expectations, so has the scale of the NCMA. The staff has doubled, the operating budget has more than tripled—to around $18 million today—and the campus has grown from 174,000 square feet of space to more than 300,000 square feet with the addition of the new building. We now occupy (certifiably) 164 acres of land, much of which is our Museum Park, ever changing. We typically serve 350,000 visitors a year, not counting the 150,000 visitors to the Park and the 123,000 who participate in our education offerings, many of which are offsite. In the Monet and Rodin years, attendance soared to 443,000 and 475,000 respectively. We have grown and are growing. A new strategic plan will open new possibilities for us to serve the public in more relevant ways.

I reflect on two conversations that shaped these two decades of my tenure. Chief curator John Coffey came to see me two weeks after I began and asked what I wanted to buy. We talked possibilities but agreed that Anselm Kiefer would be a high-profile and unexpected acquisition—if such a rare opportunity should emerge. One week later it did, when Christie’s offered the untitled triptych from the Gerald Elliott collection. With no formal process for going to auction, we jerry-rigged one with the participation of Senator Terry Sanford, chairman of the Board, and the Board’s Acquisitions Committee. I went to New York in early November and successfully acquired the painting. It made big news in the art world and generated much curiosity at home. In that moment the NCMA declared its commitment to the great artistic achievements of our time, a commitment that continues to this day.

Anselm Kiefer, Untitled, 1980–86, oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, lead, charcoal, and straw on photograph, mounted on canvas; with stones, lead, and steel cable; in three parts, Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, W. R. Valentiner, and various donors, by exchange

The second conversation was with Dan Gottlieb, director of planning. He indicated that he thought we would be a good team in imagining and executing the plan for an art park, already in the works for a couple of years by then. I said yes, of course, and off we went to build the Park Theater and begin the infrastructure for the Park. Twenty years and more than $100 million later, we are still at it. The new West Building designed by Thomas Phifer is without question the great hallmark of my directorship, and the process of doing it was the most creative experience of my life.

Recently I came across an interview with me at the outset. The questioner probed as to how I would measure my success. I answered, making the great art collection that belonged to the people yet more significant and more meaningful to more lives. And on we go.

I thank each of you who bring your genius to the Museum every day. Look around you and see the difference you make. I am grateful for your partnership.

With highest regard,

Larry

A few months back I spoke to Bill Marx, son of Harpo Marx, about his father’s purchase of Thomas Hart Benton’s Spring on the Missouri (1946). Bill let me know about a sketch for the painting—previously unknown to scholars—that the artist had sent his father. This past December, with the generous help of NCMA Trustee Jim Becher and his wife, Betty, the Museum was able to purchase the drawing at auction.

Benton made the sketch in early 1937 when the Mississippi and St. Francis rivers flooded a wide region of southeastern Missouri. The Kansas City Star had sent him to chronicle the natural disaster. The artist sent back ink sketches, six of which were featured in the newspaper’s Sunday edition under the headline, “The Great Flood in Missouri As Seen And Recorded By Thomas Hart Benton.” The short accompanying article noted that Benton had recorded an important chapter in the state’s history, and connected his reportorial work with the controversial social history murals that he had recently completed for the Missouri State Capitol. After completing his assignment for the newspaper, Benton chose to stay in the flood-devastated region and continued to document the effect that the disaster had on people living in the area. It is likely that the sketch for Spring on the Missouri, which did not appear in the newspaper, was created at this time.

The artist wrote about his experience of the flood in his autobiography, An Artist in America, which was published later that year. He noted that “descriptions can give no sense of the dread realities of flood misery—the cold mud, the lost goods, the homeless animals, the dreary standing around of destitute people.” He continued:

The roads of the flood country were full of movers. Wagons, trucks, and Model T Fords loaded with household goods, beds, stoves, etc., even chicken coops full of chickens, even with pigs, wandered slowly away from the waters. Lord knows where they were going. Every once in a while seepage from under the levee would force evacuation of a house and you would see a great struggle to get animals and goods out of the rising water. (Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1937, pp. 146–47)

In 1946—nine years after the flood—Benton’s returned to his sketch of one such panicking family and developed the composition into the painting he titled Spring on the Missouri.

Spring on the Missouri above the fireplace at Harpo Marx’s home in Rancho Mirage, California. Photo courtesy of Bill Marx. www.harposplace.com/Family/FamilyPhoto7.php

That same year, the painting was featured in an exhibition at the Associated American Artists gallery in Chicago, where it was bought by none other than Arthur “Harpo” Marx, the silent member of the Marx Brothers. Like many Hollywood celebrities, Marx collected paintings by living American artists. Spring on the Missouri was possibly the most important painting in his collection. It hung prominently above the fireplace at the actor’s home in Rancho Mirage, California. Probably at the time of the painting’s sale, Benton gave Marx the drawing, adding the inscription, “This note made in the great 1937 floods in Missouri was the original idea for your picture.” (The artist often referred to his sketches as “notes,” viewing them as records of the events he witnessed.)

This “note” provides context for the painting and highlights the artist’s role as a reporter. Benton made few changes in developing his sketch into a finished composition.

Left: Thomas Hart Benton, Study for “Spring on the Missouri,” 1937, pen and ink and sepia wash over graphite on paper, 8 13/16 x 12 in., Gift of Jim and Betty Becher, 2013; Right: Thomas Hart Benton, Spring on the Missouri, 1945, oil and tempera on Masonite panel, 30 ¼ x 40 ¼ in., Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, 1977

He clearly preferred to adhere to the facts of the scene he had observed firsthand. However, to better frame the composition, he added a shed and a washtub in the right foreground. He also included a second figure loading the wagon. The lightning bolt in the background adds a sense of urgency to the unfolding tragedy. Without the drawing, we would have no evidence of Benton’s faithfulness as a reporter or his theatrical reimagining of the narrative.

Laura Fravel is the Goodnight/Mellon curatorial research assistant at the NCMA.