DEATH AND MATERNAL LOVE: PSYCHOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS ON ROBERT MOTHERWELL’S ART
THE LITERATURE ON ROBERT MOTHERWELL treats his art in almost exclusively intellectual and formal terms. The temptation to do so is great not only because of this artist’s exceptional education and his verbal articulateness, but also because he explores the primary visual ideas in his paintings with the perseverance of a philosopher testing a hypothesis. An individual motif may reappear over and over in one painting after another, each time presented with some alteration in context. The investigation of a single shape or organizational principle often persists in this way indefinitely, and it is the presence of such recurrent motifs that unites a given group of paintings into one of Motherwell’s “series.” For example, one immediately recognizes a work from the “Open” series by the three sided-box or window motif coming down from the top of the picture, even though the “Open” paintings vary widely in mood and expression. A structural order of alternating bars and ovals, rather than a single form, characterizes the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” series; with the “Je t’aime” pictures it is this phrase written across the face of the canvas.
However, the expression of emotional content in Motherwell’s painting is rarely discussed. Preferring to focus on more exclusively formal characteristics, writers generally omit close consideration of the evocative meaning of the identifying forms and schema of these series. Yet Motherwell is more of an emotional painter than most critics have realized, and it is these reemerging motifs that earmark each series and provide access to the emotional content of the works.
After Motherwell has made several works in a series, the central pictorial motif, through its recurrence, evolves a clearly defined personality. This reappearing form or type of pictorial organization is a visual metaphor with multiple layers of meaning—enriched, but also made more specific, every time it appears in another work. It functions like a literary protagonist. Just as the character of Odysseus or Ahab unfolds through its interaction with the events of a narrative, so these highly developed pictorial actors acquire further nuances with each new painting in a series.
While this process may appear methodical, in fact, Motherwell arrives at and handles the recurrent motif for each series instinctively, not intellectually. Indeed, the creative principle underlying Motherwell’s work involves spontaneous invention. Like the Surrealists, he regards his own unconscious mind as the chief source of artistic subject matter. But the Surrealists aspired to reach an uncensored, dreamlike state in their art; they used “automatic” writing or painting to enter the hidden levels of the human psyche and to avoid conscious form control.
In the hands of the Surrealists, automatic writing or painting meant producing blindly or so quickly that there would be no interference from the intellect. Motherwell saw this psychic automatism as a creative principle capable of generating original new art without imposing a predetermined style. In retrospect, he regards this as having been the essential problem for the young American vanguard in the 1940s: to bring American art out of its esthetic provincialism and into the mainstream of European modernism, while at the same time finding a theoretical basis for generating new art. Surrealist automatism seemed to offer that potential; but on a less purely intellectual level, Motherwell was already profoundly influenced by the introspective focus of Surrealism. Nevertheless, he used this idea of automatism in a slightly different way from the Surrealists.
In contrast to the dreamlike, uncensored state to which the Surrealists aspired, Motherwell set out to capture a strong emotional experience of which he was highly conscious from the start and in which he had an active involvement. This does not mean he consciously understood all of its psychological implications or motives, but that he began with a strong emotion which he sought to objectify in his art. Thus, as an object, each of Motherwell’s paintings intentionally embodies both a psychological experience and the artist’s active struggle to translate it into visual metaphor. In addition, every work also brings associations from beyond its own ontogeny—allusions to other events in the artist’s emotional life history, previous pictures, and external influences. In sum, each brushstroke and form is charged with meaning, and a whole new aspect of the expressive richness of Motherwell’s work begins to emerge as we closely examine these details—relating specific formal devices with particular emotions and piecing together the dynamic interaction between them.
To take a specific instance, Robert Motherwell’s Red Open No. 3, 1973, unites a variety of established motifs from the artist’s earlier oeuvre. Visual ideas that identify the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” series, the Little Spanish Prison, 1941, and prison window pictures and the “Opens” all come together in this one work. The association of these pictorial metaphors in Red Open No. 3 indicates the extent to which all of these superficially quite different-looking groups of pictures have in common one particularly powerful constellation of emotions. But before delving into a specific interpretation of what such metaphors mean, we should first establish the formal continuities across these various groups of paintings.
In contrast to the formality of the precise, three-sided window motif in Red Open No. 3, the eccentric, faintly incised, vertical striations provide an intimate presence. The verticals, in this respect, correspond to the visually similar alternating bars in the Little Spanish Prison, where as Motherwell recently said, “the geometry is deliberately freehand, emphasizing sensibility.”1 The tightly controlled line and orderly structure of Red Open No. 3 seem to keep emotion in check, while in the looser strokes it emerges freely. The particular quality of the more spontaneous gesturing in this picture carries forward an expressiveness that persists, in varying degrees, from the beginning of Motherwell’s career. As a theme, the conflict of gestural intimacy and an imposing grandeur of organization emerged at its most intense in the series of “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”—indeed it consistently dominates every “Elegy” picture.
The format of the “Elegies” germinated out of a small ink drawing that Motherwell made in 1948 to accompany Harold Rosenberg’s poem “A Bird For Every Bird,” for the planned second issue of Possibilities (never published). The next year he reinterpreted the idea in a small painting on cardboard called At Five in the Afternoon (the words for the title came from the refrain in Garcia Lorca’s poem “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”). Here, in the first real “Elegy” painting, the restrained composition, with its regimented cadence of vertical bars and ovals, and the austerity of the colorless palette stand in opposition to the impulsive, personal elements—drips, a free irregularity of the gesturing and the variety of handling. Even within the definition of the structural order itself this contrast exists: the variation in the bars from a columnlike member, left of center, to a frail little line, just to the right, reveals a strong drive toward spontaneous expression, a resistance to the systematic ordering. Again, the contrast between controlling order and free, unruly emotion.
After At Five in the Afternoon, Motherwell did a much larger picture with the same basic organization entitled Granada. (Granada, not coincidently, was the birthplace of Lorca and the site of his unjust execution by the fascists.) Next, still in 1949, Motherwell painted a series of related works titled after other Spanish cities; then he renamed all these early pieces Elegy to the Spanish Republic, dedicated the entire series to Spain—and especially to Lorca’s generation of Spanish intellectuals—and numbered the pictures in sequence, as he has continued to do with subsequent works in this idiom.
In Red Open No. 3, the reference to the “Elegies” exists not only in the expressive calligraphy of the parallel lines, but in their presence as a structural rationale. They create a sequence of vertical bands that relates formally to the most identifying characteristic of the “Elegy” pictures, namely, the cadence of upright bars with forms squeezed in between them. Red Open No. 3 also displays some of the same Cubist formality and flatness that predominates in the “Elegies,” where all the forms cling to a single visual plane.2
In 1950, Motherwell painted a second version of At Five in the Afternoon. This work has scratched-in parallel lines like those in Red Open No. 3, thus further establishing the visual link between Red Open No. 3, and the “Elegies.” In addition, the incised strokes in the widest bar of At Five in the Afternoon (2nd version) describe an elongated box or window with three sides, in almost the same proportions as in Red Open No. 3.
As a compositional idea, the parallel bands of Red Open No. 3 and the “Elegies” began as far back as the Little Spanish Prison and have recurred, particularly in pictures associated with themes of rebellion, oppression, and death: notably in the “Elegies,” but also in Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943, La Resistance, 1945, and other works. From the outset, the motif seems to have had a specific expressive character, associated with prison bars. The title of the Little Spanish Prison certainly suggests this connection to bars. In addition to these highly individuated bars in the Little Spanish Prison, the small red box (perhaps already connected to the idea of a window by 1941, as it was later in the “Open” series) suggests yet another visual association to Red Open No. 3.
Red Open No. 3 also bears the phrase “Je t’aime” written almost invisibly across it, thus connecting it to the small series of similarly inscribed paintings done in the middle ’50s (1953–57). The French phrase, which identifies this series, sets a tone of European intellectualism with which Motherwell has always felt great affinity. For him, this represents a tradition of refinement and elegant restraint in both painting and writing. In these pictures, the same opposition reemerges once again between the formality embodied in the allusion to European culture and the expressive outpourings of the painterly areas around it.
Now, what do these recurrent metaphors mean? Does their simultaneous presence in Red Open No. 3 suggest that their psychological content also interrelates in a continuous way? And why does the artist consistently seem to present an opposition between formal or structural devices and more freely emotional elements?
With respect to the “Elegies,” the content of their chief expressive metaphor (i.e. the format of alternating bars and ovals in black on white) has a particularly well defined character. In 1950 Motherwell wrote that the “Elegies” are “all in black and white: they are funeral pictures, laments, dirges.”3 Two decades later he still discussed their intent along similar lines, claiming that “the ‘Elegies’ treat life and death as fundamentals,”4 and in 1963 he described their content as the “insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot.”5 The reference to Spain in the “Elegies” also carried these kinds of associations. For intellectuals of the 1930s and ’40s, the writings of the modern poets Lorca and Alberti and their contemporaries, as well as Lorca’s unjust execution, came to stand for a deeply felt sense of tragedy about the Spanish republican defeat. To many, this event symbolized the plight of the individual against oppression and death. But to Motherwell, Lorca and the Spanish Civil War also represented an exceedingly personal confrontation not only with the finality of death but with a whole range of the painter’s own deepest anxieties. The magnitude of these emotions for Motherwell, and the specificity of the “Elegies” as a metaphorical embodiment of them, is demonstrated in an anecdote the artist told me.6
Motherwell said that he generally likes to keep the first work in every series as a point of departure for further experimentation and also “a lighthouse to return to if I get lost, a way to get back to the original impulse.”7 Thus, in 1971, he felt especially upset at losing the first painted version of the “Elegies” (At Five in the Afternoon, 1949) in his divorce settlement with Helen Frankenthaler, his third wife. But before he let the picture go to her, he decided to make a faithful, although enlarged copy of it for himself—something he had never done before with any painting (even the second At Five in the Afternoon did not copy the first version). He worked in the peace of his Provincetown studio and, as he recalled, it was a beautiful July day when he brought the picture near completion. Nothing particular was bothering him; he felt fine, and the work progressed well that day. He had blocked out the major shapes and was adding the final details when, suddenly, he sank into a profound suicidal depression. The anxiety drove him downstairs to get a shot of whisky, which he had strictly avoided for some time because of his health (hence this itself could have been a self-destructive gesture). The intensity and suddenness of these emotions had caught him entirely by surprise: there seemed to be no reason for the attack of anxiety. But then, as he told me, he gradually realized that the only time in his life when he had actually contemplated suicide was in the period during which he had painted the first version of the “Elegies”—the one which he had now undertaken to copy. The details of the painting—its drips under the large forms, its meeting points of the contours8—had vividly recreated all of that earlier emotional state.9
In early December of 1948—about the time of the first “Elegy” painting—Maria Moyers, his first wife, walked out on him. She took his car and left with another man, someone who had lived near them in East Hampton. Motherwell described his feelings at the time as dominated by an intense sense of “abandonment, desperation, and helplessness.”10 Then, from December to February of 1948–49, he lived and worked in a room on 14th Street in the city, with a cloud of depression hanging over that entire winter. This period molded the expressive core of the “Elegies” and every “Elegy” picture has dealt with this depressing content—some more intensely than others.
Motherwell painted Granada (the second in the series of “Elegies”) during a blizzard in that same winter of 1948–49. He did the work in an uninterrupted 18-hour session,11 alone in his New York studio, and this work also commemorates the feelings of rejection and abandonment that pervaded the artist’s life at that time. Later, Bradley Walker Tomlin had to convince Motherwell not to destroy the work:12 one might imagine why the artist would wish—at least on some level—to eradicate those memories.
The “Je t’aime” pictures coincided with what the artist described as a “Virginia Woolf marriage,”13 and the series stopped at about the time that marriage (his second) ended. The works were, needless to say, “not love poems to my wife,”14 as he put it, but a kind of compensation. Literally, of course, the phrase means “I love you”; however, Motherwell explained that when he used these words he really intended to convey “I am capable of love”—that the potential was there, but frustrated.15 As an isolated statement directed at no one in particular, this phrase sounds desperate, like the cry of a child who feels unloved, hence all the more in need of love. It is essentially a demand for affection, with the unconscious reasoning going roughly like this: “I love you and therefore I deserve to be loved in return.” This statement is a kind of protest that expresses a feeling of deprivation, a hunger for love that would result from a childhood in which a child’s mother in some way neglected his needs, which seems to have been the case with Motherwell. When I suggested this interpretation to the artist, he confirmed it and then went on to describe his mother as a vain, severely disturbed woman who “used to beat the hell out of me until my head was bleeding.”16 One wonders where the artist’s father was when such events occurred; perhaps he simply lacked the personal fortitude to control them. In any case, this feeling and need proceeded forward from Motherwell’s youth as a constant in his personality, and clearly his marriage could not fulfill this longing—though another relationship might have done so better. Indeed, complete fulfillment would have required making up for a whole early life in which maternal love was, or was perceived to be, in short supply.
Children begin life with a demand for the absolute attentions of their mother; they need to be fed and cared for almost constantly. Only gradually does a child adjust to ever-increasing recognition of separation. For boys, the father has the ambiguous position of presenting a role model and yet simultaneously an obstacle for the child’s acquisition of its mother’s undivided affections. From the vantage point of a child’s fantasy, the competition with the father involves a desire to eliminate him but also a fear of anger and retribution in response. (Freud, of course, called this situation the “Oedipus complex” and made it the cornerstone of his psychology.17) With the young Motherwell, the uncertain affections of his mother exaggerated this classic childhood crisis and left him with the intense vulnerability and the feeling of maternal deprivation that seem to express themselves in the “Je t’aime” paintings. The artist’s first three marriage experiences reaffirmed the same lack of trust since, as he told me, in each instance the woman broke up the relationship and deserted him, always with another man in the background.18 Symbolically, this re-enacts the Oedipal fantasy.
To complete the childhood fantasy, one would expect the artist to imagine his father as threatening and powerful: he, after all, has the imagined position of standing in the way of success (which is first conceived in terms of the child’s acquisition of total access to his mother) and of obstructing self-realization (which consists of the fulfillment of the child’s identification with the model of the father who has the mother). Yet Motherwell has described his father as a gentle man, despite some conflicts they had over Motherwell’s career and life-style. Nevertheless, one gets a glimpse of a thinly veiled alternate vision in the artist’s mind, when he described a de Chirico painting for a 1942 article in the first issue of VVV:
Standing before these late (1939) gouaches . . . what remains now of the expressiveness in that work of 1914 symbolizing the content of The Child’s Brain, with its father-image? Yes, the father! Shockingly naked but unrevealed, hairy, immovable, inescapable, standing like a massive rock on the silent shore of the unconscious mind, a rock unseeing, with its closed eyes, but a rock resisting all attempts to pass beyond, a rock to burrow into, if that is the only possibility of getting beyond, but a rock eternally waiting, waiting for when it will be at once judge and executioner, judge of the guilt inherent in killing the origin of one’s being in order to be, and executioner by virtue of one’s fear of being free.19
Again, the images parallel those of the Oedipal father whom one must eliminate (to kill “the origin of one s own being”) in order to realize oneself; he is the rock, the impassive, omnipresent obstacle; he is judge and executioner.
Curiously, the cultural heroes with whom Motherwell identifies all had similar experiences with mothering. The mothers of Lorca, Gide and Proust were frightening and unrelating.20 Baudelaire—a guiding inspiration for Motherwell from the outset—was an illegitimate child who felt outcast by birth and shared a great mutual animosity with the French general whom his mother married.
From a psychological point of view, the strong need for maternal affection reveals another conflicting factor at work in the “Elegies” as well as in the “Je t’aime” series. Robert Hobbs has pointed out, from conversations with the artist, that the black forms in the “Elegies” “have repeatedly been likened to cojones, gonads of a bull, emblems of the defeated and the death, which are removed and tacked on a wall after a valorous bullfight.”21 Characteristically, childhood anger toward the Oedipal father involves an anticipation of reciprocal anger, usually manifested in a child by fear of castration.
For Motherwell, the decision to paint may of itself have unconsciously aroused such feelings (the Oedipal challenge to his father and the castration fears) since this necessitated a defiance of his father’s adamant wishes against a career in art. These anxieties must also have been stimulated, at that time, by the implicitly castrating choice which Motherwell’s father offered him of either giving up art for a $25,000 a year job in his father’s bank (a lot of money in those days) or of receiving $50 a week to paint, with the proviso (N.B.) that he never have children.22
The deep sense of depression expressed in the “Elegy” paintings no doubt emerges out of castration fear, related anger (which can become self-directed), and the sense of (ultimately maternal) abandonment. Recently, Motherwell described the Little Spanish Prison as embodying a similar mixture of emotions: ” . . . the basic feeling is oppressive, compassionate, and yet the picture displays a certain assertiveness.”23 The “oppression” and the “assertiveness” parallel the psychological fear and anger—the submission to the aggressive father, as well as the wish to become him and to take his place. The “compassion” may include not only the love he felt for his mother and for the idealized father (with whom he identified), but also that which he must have wished to receive. There is also an element of self-pity for the feelings injured by the mother’s inadequacies. As a whole, Motherwell’s work of the 1940s was dominated by such feelings of deprivation and abandonment. He reflected: “Thirty years later, only half remembering the original impulse, what strikes me now is that the true subject-matter of these early works is a ‘wounded person.’”24
Through the echo of formal devices from the “Elegies” and the Little Spanish Prison, Red Open No. 3 also carries reference to their emotional content. In addition to the cadence of parallel bars, the incised window motif in the second version of At Five in the Afternoon, and the general opposition between a formal structuring and free, expressive gesture, Red Open No. 3 also relates to the development of the expressive content in the “Elegies” and the Little Spanish Prison through its color scheme, insofar as the colors of Red Open No. 3 directly parallel those in Lorca’s “Llanto.” In the first parts of the poem, dealing with the dramatic moment when Mejías has been gored by the bull and lies in the ring, the color images are blood red; the later parts of the poem, more reflective and mournful, call upon the austerity of whites (a white shroud, lilies, and white snails).25 The red in Red Open No. 3 and the blacks in the “Elegies” both function as active agents of anger, passion and death, where the whites are the more controlled emotions—passivity, reflection and grieving.26
In bringing together the central expressive metaphors from the “Elegies,” the Little Spanish Prison, the “Je t’aime” pictures and the “Opens,” Red Open No. 3 embodies perhaps the most terrifying personal content of this artist’s psychology. But it also contains a visual analogue for his means of emotional defense. An opposition of coolly calculated, white lines to the sensuosity, not only of the stripes but of the rich red surface, recapitulates what the artist himself describes as his response to extreme danger. In the spring of 1974 Motherwell had been extremely ill and was told that in the following fall he would have to undergo a series of operations which he might not survive (happily, he recovered). Faced with the immediate threat of death, he expected to paint a summer full of angry pictures—works with intense colors’ and strong contrast. Instead, he made cool, controlled paintings in pink and blue and gray. He responded to the fear with great personal formality, an almost ritualistic restraint. Throughout the hospitalization he also behaved, as he later described it, like an English butler, with excessive politeness and decorum.27 This response characterizes the fundamental order of Red Open No. 3. But the use of the recurrent motif also seems to reassure the artist in the face of intense emotions. Indeed the almost obsessive attachment to a single recurrent shape or visual order in each series resembles the dependence that children develop on a particular plaything for security; similarly, an adult depression may foster a fixation on an object or person as if for want of stability. With Motherwell’s painting, the recurrent motif tends to be the intellectual ordering principle, while the strong, less controlled emotion belongs more frequently to the individual nuances of paint application.
The confrontation with death and abandonment, as explored in the “Elegies,” and the cry for maternal love in the “Je t’aime” paintings, are both universal human problems. If we insist here on pointing out the way in which a painting provides a symbolic resolution for one man’s inner turmoil, such scrutiny ultimately betters our understanding of its general application. A Motherwell painting is, after all, not identical with his psyche; rather it is a self-contained object, structured as a system of metaphors, which embodies a whole world view. It is constructed by an individual, to be sure, but someone with the extraordinary ability to transform his thoughts into universals and so offer the world an object which contains more widely valuable knowledge of human struggle.
Jonathan Fineberg is assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois.
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NOTES
1. H. Arneson, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1977, note to pl. 58.
2. Motherwell said, “There is in my early work a remnant of Cubism in what painters call the absolute insistence on holding the picture plane.” From an unpublished interview with Arthur Cohen, Provincetown, Mass. Aug. 18, 1969: cited in Harry B. Titus, “The Collage,” in Robert Motherwell: Recent Work, exhibition catalogue, Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, N.J., 1973, p. 22.
3. Robert Motherwell, exhibition catalogue, Sam Kootz Gallery, New York 1950.
4. Robert Motherwell: Recent Work, exhibition catalogue, Princeton Art Museum, Princeton. N.J., 1973, p. 14.
5 Robert Motherwell, “Robert Motherwell: a conversation at lunch,” An Exhibition of the Works of Robert Motherwell, Smith College, Northhampton, Mass., 1963.
6. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, January 10, 1976, Greenwich, Conn. I recount the details here exactly as they were told to me.
7. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, January 8, 1977, Greenwich, Conn.
8. These, the artist told me, were the most important part—not the larger forms (conversation, January 10, 1976, Greenwich, Conn.).
9. It may surprise some readers that an abstract symbol could have such evocative power. The mechanism resembles what more commonly happens in a gripping film; the characters, setting, and events are nothing more than constructs of a writer’s imagination, but in them the audience sees a likeness of its own present, past, or hypothesized emotions and consequently finds the fiction on the screen entirety believable. Robert Motherwell has remarked—as have many artists—that his paintings sometimes evoke feelings with such authority that they actually seem more real than people (Robert Motherwell, lecture, Art Institute of Chicago, November 4, 1976). If the forms in a painting are more abstract than in a film, the difference is only a relative one. In both instances, the artist must transform the wide world of his experience and emotions into a system of metaphors which provide a convincing alternative universe. The affective power of the work of art rests on the credibility of the artist’s esthetic fantasy, and this in turn relies on the completeness, the consistency, and the imagination with which he elaborates his metaphorical world.
10. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, January 8, 1977, Greenwich, Conn.
11. Frank O’Hara, Robert Motherwell, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1956, p. 79.
12. Ibid., p. 79.
13. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, January 8, 1977, Greenwich, Conn.
14. Ibid.
15. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, November 5. 1976, Chicago, III.
16. Telephone conversation with Robert Motherwell, November 18, 1976. This description came up in a discussion of this essay’s content which suggests a further association of the bleeding head with the red of Red Open No. 3. Joseph Masheck suggests that the phrase “Je t’aime” may be addressed by the painter to the painting itself, and/or vice versa, and that perhaps the artist even identified the painting that he loved with himself. To be sure, these paintings reaffirm for the artist his capacity to love as well as his own sense of self-worth. Masheck also calls attention to the very name Motherwell inherited, a name that is peculiarly ironic in this case and that may well have affected his expectations or outlook.
17. For a clear and concise explanation of the Oedipus complex, see S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Standard Edition), London, 1953, pp. 207f, 329–38.
18. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, January 8, 1977, Greenwich, Conn.
19. Robert Motherwell, “Notes on Mondrian and Chico,” VVV, no. 1, June 1942, p. 60.
20. In the Three Tragedies, Lorca presents a series of terrifying maternal images: in Blood Wedding, the woman runs away with an old lover on the day of her wedding to another man, causing a fight which results in the death of both men; in Yerma, the woman causes the death of her husband for frustrating her maternal desires; in The House of Bernarda Alba, the widowed mother thwarts the passions of her four daughters until the youngest is driven to kill herself.
21. Robert C. Hobbs, in Robert Motherwell, exhibition catalogue, Dusseldorf, Germany, 1976, p. 31.
22. Conversation, November 4, 1976, Chicago, Illinois.
23. Arneson, note to pl. 58.
24. Arneson, note to pls. 59 and 60.
25. The imagery of the Lorca poem is treated in detail in the introduction by Robert Hobbs to the Dusseldorf exhibition catalogue.
26. This association of red and white, the rose and the lily, the blush of the maiden against her white skin, and the blood running down the white thigh of the wounded Menelaus (in the Iliad) pervades western literature from its beginnings. Even more remarkable is the equally ancient and consistent association of anger and death with sexuality (as in the passage from the Iliad referred to above).
27. Conversation with Robert Motherwell, May 1976, Provincetown. Mass.
