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It may seem illogical to begin a two-part retrospective with work from an artist's mid- to late career, but the "Open" series proves a stirring reintroduction to the work of Robert Motherwell. If the tag "literary painter" follows the late American painter around like a loyal but rather portly dog, these five large-scale canvases, completed between 1968 and 1970 (he worked on the overall series from 1968 until his death, in 1991), and associated works on paper, foreground his painterly agility — leading us in a dance between considerations of inside and out, intellectual and physical worlds, perhaps even life and death as we hover in front of these formal thresholds. "Just how open is open?" we are asked as we negotiate windowlike, rectangular forms that, in various densities of hue and stages of completion, appear to float on or puncture gently pulsating monochrome grounds. If, when pushed to the top of the painting, as in Open No. 161: In Beige and Black (1970), the form is closed off by the canvas edge and the painting apparently finished, a work such as Open 22 (1968) — three sides of a large rectangle limned in charcoal on a gray-white background — invites us mentally to take part in the process of completion. This is painting as a portal that requires of the viewer an equivalent outlook of openness and adventure. It's audience-participatory art done AbEx style, and joining in is, for once, a real pleasure.

"Robert Motherwell" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.