Mallarmé topoi in the work of Robert Motherwell1

Abstract

What led Robert Motherwell to Stephane Mallarme, and what sort of interest did he have in the French nineteenth-century poet? In an interview with Robert Wagener of 14 June 1974, Motherwell retrospectively explained his position: Forty years ago I was trying to find out about a certain kind of modernist vision and it so happens that, among other people, some Symbolist poets came closest to expressing it.... In the 1930s, it was almost impossible to find out in English, in America, modern art's deepest concerns, theoretically and culturally. I mean, you could see reproductions, and by the 1940s the Museum of Modern Art had the best collection in the world of modern art. You could go and look at it, but to find out what was on these guys' minds apart from the technical considerations, which were obvious, it was almost impossible.2