The Voyage: Ten Years After

Many of Motherwell's motifs recurred over the course of his career. He often revisited earlier feelings and expressions, altering them and adding new dimensions. This was the case with The Voyage: Ten Years After (1961). Motherwell's earlier The Voyage, a large-scale work of 1949, displays the artist's long-standing interest in the nature of wall painting. At that stage he largely utilized a formal vocabulary derived from Synthetic Cubism. Motherwell explained that this work refers to Baudelaire's famous poem "The Voyage," whose last line asserts triumphantly the poet's intention to voyage to the depths of the unknown in order to find the new. [1] Returning to this theme, The Voyage: Ten Tears After indicates, in its enormous sweep, Motherwell's far more complex attitude to the nature of that questing experience. Nothing here is as fixed or as certain as the Cubist forms in the earlier painting. Although this later work still presents a pronounced horizontal vision, the spaces are vaster and less specifically delineated. Scanning these expanding spaces, the viewer is forced, by the grandeur and spread along the horizontal axis, to enter several quite different climates. In this painting Motherwell used his newly discovered technique of splashing and spattering in a totally free manner, allowing the role of chance, always present in his thoughts, to take on greater liberties.