Turner and Motherwell

When I was a teenager my friends and I had a brief vogue for coming up with, and then actually watching, outlandish double features where the two movies made some sort of radical juxtaposition. As I recall, our two favorite combos were The Wizard of Oz and Reservoir Dogs, and The Land Before Time and Total Recall. I thought of this recently when I deliberately timed my latest visit to the De Young such that I could catch both the Turner show before it closes and the Motherwell show that recently opened.You could hardly cook up a weirder pairing, and yet it worked wonderfully. There are a great many things to be said, of course, and many opinions held, about both of these artists' work. But to my eye the common thread is that in they both just scream BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY so loudly into my eyeballs that I can hardly stand it. Here are the images that most caught my eye--Turner first, then scroll down to the bottom for Motherwell, just because that's the order I saw them in. And, nota bene, the only reason there are so many more of Joseph's pictures there than Robert's is because the former has a gigantic show and the later a petite one--personally I could have looked at many more of both.