Frontier No. 10

Frontier No. 10 belongs to an intimate but powerful series of works that Robert Motherwell produced during an especially prolific summer spent in Europe in 1958, during his honeymoon with Helen Frankenthaler. Following a hasty departure from Madrid in late June, the newlyweds settled in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, a fishing village on the Atlantic coast. After a relative drought in his output, Motherwell began making paintings and drawings with unprecedented ease and spontaneity, using locally sourced painting supplies. Among the first works produced at this time were a series of about a dozen drawings distinguished by brushy strokes in black paint that float against a white background (now yellowed with age). These were inspired by Motherwell’s appreciation of surrealist automatism, a practice where spontaneous marks are used to create shapes. Reflecting on these works made near the Spanish border, Motherwell observed that they represented to him a "release after a long time of sterility; crossing the frontier, so to speak."[1] Frontier No. 10 is distinguished by the overlay of brown and blue pigments on the dominating black calligraphic strokes. The series continues in compressed form the breakthrough compositional approach Motherwell first arrived at a decade earlier in Elegy to the Spanish Republic that spawned a twenty-year exploration of form and gesture across paintings with the same title.


[1] Robert Motherwell, caption for Frontier No. 2 in An Exhibition of the Work of Robert Motherwell, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass., 1963, n.p.