Essay in honor of Robert Motherwell's centenary: “temporalized form”: mediating Romanticism and American Expressionism—Robert Motherwell, Henri Bergson, and the ontological origins of abstraction around 18001

Abstract

The influence of process metaphysics on the development of abstraction between 1800 and the second half of the 20th century can best be exemplified with the case of the American Expressionist painter and theoretician Robert Motherwell (1915–1991). Taking as its starting point Motherwell's exposure to the History of Idea of Romanticism, Arthur O. Lovejoy's yearlong seminar at Harvard (1937–38), the artist's affinity with fluid forms through motion brushstrokes in Romanticist painting is analyzed as a preformative stage of his own transitory creations. This is done by structural comparison between Motherwell's written reflections and Romanticist art theory. Motherwell's specific perception through Bergson's and Whitehead's lens of immanence and multiplicity, I argue, resonates Lovejoy's principle of “Romantic Evolutionism,” in its turn from being to becoming, derived from the philosophies of the Spiritualist Maine de Biran and the Idealist–Empiricist George Berkeley.

Keywords

• Henri Bergson
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Arthur O. Lovejoy
• Eugène Delacroix
• John Constable
• immanence
• multiplicity
• temporalized form
• evolutionary aesthetics
• history of ideas