“Sheer Presence: Monumental Paintings by Robert Motherwell”

For many of Abstract Expressionists, bigger was better when it came to painting, a credo that Robert Motherwell, arguably the most polished and erudite of the bunch, avidly followed. This show of eight compositions spanning a period between the 1960s and 1990s lives up to its title with a selection of canvases whose enormity was calculated to swallow the viewer’s field of vision. Indeed in his own mind, Motherwell’s intent was to overthrow the “century-long tendency of the French to domesticize modern painting, to make it intimate,” as he put it. Essentially, Motherwell was returning to the “grande machine” scale of the academic painting these very same modernists had rebelled against. Whether Motherwell understood the irony involved is another matter.