Catalog published on the occassion of the exhibition "Robert Motherwell: Early Collages" held at Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 26-September 8, 2013; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 27, 2013-January 5, 2014.

A number of Robert Motherwell's most important early works were collage-paintings, beginning with his first effort in the spring of 1943, "Pierrot's Hat," made while working alongside Jackson Pollock in the latter's studio. "I took to collage like a duck to water," Motherwell later reflected, and he continued to "play with papers" for the rest of his life, esteeming his skill in the medium as one of his "chief gifts." Collage also helped the artist reconcile his relationship to European modernism (particularly Surrealism) on the one hand, and American Abstract Expressionism on the other. Reproducing a concise selection of collages from throughout the artist's career in full color, this volume also includes a series of "case studies" on individual collages and broader essays by critic Mel Gooding that examine their composition, palette and literary allusions, and Motherwell's unique position bridging Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell’s abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead’s highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead’s processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead’s process philosophy—inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances—set the stage for Motherwell’s future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.