Video No. 6023. English Language Pal VHS.
An Exploration of Art on Film.
'Storming The Citadel'.
Directed by Catherine Tatge.
Robert Motherwell (1915-91) was one of the pioneers in American art's "heroic age" - the development of Abstract Expressionism. This programme, made shortly before his death in 1991, is an exploration of the Abstract Expressionist movement and a portrait of one of its last survivors.
Coming to New York in the early 1940s, Motherwell became one of the key figures in an artistic revolution, as he and a group of fellow painters set out to change the face of American painting. The film charts the battle led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Motherwell himself, to make American painting equal to great painting of the European tradition, and to shift the centre of modern art from Paris to New York.
Interviews with Motherwell focus on the origins of the birth of Abstract Expressionism, and on his philosophical quest to define the tenets of modernism. Motherwell talks eloquently about the struggle to create the mutual support the artists gave each other during the 1940s and 1950s when museums and galleries were not interested in buying their work, their will to survive and the sad brevity of many of the artists' lives. It includes archive footage and photographs of the artists, of Greenwich Village where they lived, and interviews with artists, critics and art historians associated with the movement.
Interwoven throughout is film of Motherwell painting in his Greenwich studio and preparing for a major retrospective of his work a the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
