Robert Motherwell
Rare prints and proof sequences.

In 1965, following what he considered to be a disappointing retrospective of his work at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Motherwell found himself in a period of personal and artistic depression. [...]

'So the printer and I struck up an agreement which was as much to my advantage psychologically as it was to his economically. The psychological advantage lay in cooperation and the sociability of working with a craftsman, choosing the size of paper or of a stone, conversing, discussing, and having a working relationship with another human being. And though my approach was in many ways primitive, it was then that I began to get deeply interested in printmaking. I had always loved working on paper, but it was the camaraderie of the artist-printer relationship that titled the scale definitively.'

Wether it was the excitement of working in a new medium or the fact that collaboration was an appropriate distraction, Motherwell's first editions [...] were, up to that point, his most successful translations to print of the sense of immediacy that marked his best paintings.

(Siri Engberg, Introduction in: Engberg & Banach, Robert Motherwell: The Complete Prints 1940-1991 Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2003.)