Gauloises on Scarlet over Yellow #3

ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-1991)

Gauloises on Scarlet over Yellow #3

signed with the artist's initials and dated 'RM 72' (lower right)

acrylic and printed paper collage on canvas board

29 3/4 x 14 7/8 inches (75.6 x 37.8 cm)

framed: 38 3/16 x 23 3/16 inches (97 x 58.9 cm)

Executed in 1972-1982.

PROVENANCE:

Dedalus Foundation, New York, 1991

Anon. sale; Sotheby's, New York, 14 May 2003, lot 154

Evelyn Aimis Fine Art, Miami

Private collection, 2004

Private collection

Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 11 May 2016, lot 209

Private collection, New York, acquired from the above sale by the present owner

EXHIBITED:

New York, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Robert Motherwell Collages, October-December 2015

LITERATURE:

J. Flam, K. Rogers, and T. Clifford, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Volume Three: Collages and Paintings on Paper and Paperboard, New Haven and London, 2012, p. 170, no. C333 (illustrated).

NOTES:

Born in 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) emerged as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the movement’s most articulate voices. He studied philosophy at Stanford and Harvard before turning to painting under the guidance of Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. His intellectual foundation distinguished him within the New York School, infusing his art with both discipline and lyricism. Over his lifetime, Motherwell was the subject of more than two hundred solo exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, and countless other institutions around the world.

Motherwell’s art fused European modernist traditions with a distinctly American sense of scale and gesture. Deeply influenced by Matisse, Picasso, and the Surrealists, he developed a visual language in which color and form conveyed emotion with philosophical depth. Collage became central to this language. Through it, he merged the physical world of printed paper and text with the abstract logic of painting, turning ordinary materials into meditations on culture and memory. His collages are both precise and spontaneous, revealing an artist who found profound meaning in the balance between order and chance.

Gauloises on Scarlet over Yellow #3, executed between 1972 and 1982, epitomizes this balance. Against a field of radiant red brushed with subtle yellow, flattened blue Gauloises cigarette packages occupy the center of the composition. Their presence evokes the atmosphere of postwar Paris—the cafés of artists and writers—and pays tribute to the modernist lineage that shaped his sensibility. The serene blue forms rest upon an impassioned red ground, suggesting both dialogue and tension between intellect and instinct, Europe and America. In transforming a familiar fragment of daily life into a luminous meditation on color and meaning, Motherwell affirms his belief that abstraction can express the full range of human experience with clarity, emotion, and grace.