The Mod Squad


Wall Painting III Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today in Rochester, New York.

The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in New York will be hosting our Treasures To Go traveling exhibition from January 28 through March 25, 2001. This abstract work by Robert Motherwell is one of seventy treasures featured in this exhibition.

Motherwell's "Wall Paintings" grew from commissions for synagogues in Millburn, New Jersey, and Springfield, Massachusetts. In arriving at designs for these major works, he developed imagery that was suggestive and metaphorical without having any fixed meaning. The contrast of dark and light, hard-edged and curved forms reminds us of essential dualities.

Source: Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Robert Motherwell, 1915–91, Wall Painting III, 1952, oil on fiberboard, 48 x 72 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Dedalus Foundation and museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum.