Robert Motherwell’s Interior with Pink Nude (1951) resides in an uncertain space between figuration and abstraction

Robert Motherwell’s Interior with Pink Nude (1951) resides in an uncertain space between figuration and abstraction. While the picture is a fairly straightforward composition, the multiple layers of paint on the surface and the obvious reworking and overpainting contribute to a general spatial and figural ambiguity. The two black-and-pink forms with multiple appendages are painted on a cloudy ochre ground that is unevenly applied and of varying thickness. With the title as a guide, it is not hard to imagine the pink, organic forms on the left as the bulbous limbs of a woman. A more ambitious reading might go so far as to suggest that the balloon-shaped black mass is her head thrown back, and the yellow mark on its dark surface is a reflection of light. Such an interpretation of this picture is undermined, however, by the small, black, five-pronged shape sitting above a pink rectangle to the right, which is even more difficult to identify. Numerous objects can come to mind: a bouquet on a shelf, a reflection in a mirror, perhaps a second figure set back in the distance. Moreover, the traces and marks of the layers that have been painted over or scraped off, notably on the right, where they suggest a box or doorlike form, contribute to the picture’s spatial indeterminacy, creating a sensation of interior depth. All of this suggests that the process of arriving at the painting’s endpoint was protracted and improvisational. As the work was painted in New York City in 1951, a moment when improvisation was particularly valorized in American art and literature, it is tempting to read Interior with Pink Nude as Motherwell’s effort to engage with the pervasive aesthetic of spontaneity. Doing so, however, would provide only a limited reading of what is in fact Motherwell’s fascinating, if conflicted, investigation into the dominant pictorial languages present in post-World War II America, including gestural abstraction, Surrealism, and the work of such influential modernists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.