Robert Motherwell at Barakat Contemporary, Seoul

So, I braved the rain today to look at a few galleries near Gyeongbok Palace, not expecting much and wondering why I was wasting my time, as usual. However, I specifically wanted to see a show of work at Barakat Contemporary by Robert Motherwell, who was part of the so-called New York School that dominated art in America from roughly the late 40s to early 60s. Now, I never particularly cared for his work, it seemed calculated and self-aggrandizing, and looked dated even in the late 70s when I first saw it. Still, I wanted to see if my impressions would change by looking at his work again. As an artist, I can appreciate that Motherwell put some thought into his work and tried to accommodate both his older influences, such as maybe Cubism and Surrealism, and the spontaneity of his peers, such as Pollock and de Kooning. Just mentioning those names, though, makes his work look stodgy in comparison. Where Pollock completely cut loose, Motherwell seemed hesitant, splashing paint (or ink) but trying to do so "tastefully." And where de Kooning would build and rebuild forms in paint until the canvas was on the verge of visual incoherence, and yet still held together, Motherwell stuck with a few tropes, including the leaden ovals in his endless "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" series, which were meant as a somber sociopolitical commemoration and yet got diluted by repetition (imagine if Picasso had spent his career painting versions of "Guernica" over and over). Motherwell's palette also immediately dated his work; while his contemporaries de Kooning and Pollock came up with a signature pink and used aluminum paint, respectively, Motherwell stuck with matte black acrylic and brown ochre for the most part, meant to have Old School associations with soil and the void. When another color peers out through the black expanses, it feels parsimonious. What really turned me off to Motherwell's work all those decades ago was that I couldn't relate to the sensibility behind the work, the aloof and fashionably left-leaning artist chain smoking Gauloises in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris,as implied by his titles (and collage materials), nor to the work itself, which strained at symbolism and theatricality, while many of his peers let the viewer experience the actual paint on canvas and make their own associations, for the most part. Having said all this, I think Motherwell was capable of creating a grand expression in his work at times, helped by the scale of some pieces, and his collages could be charming and even fun when he allowed himself to be more casual. Also, I did like the tiny (8 x 10 inch) Iberia No. 30 from 1969, mostly for the textures in the built-up acrylic. It's close to the sort of suggestive abstraction that seems to hold up better as time goes by.