Motherwell constructed his first collage with Jackson Pollock in 1943 when Peggy Guggenheim invited them to show in a collage exhibition featuring the European masters. The medium, new for both artists, had nominal impact on Pollock, who treated in primarily as a composite support for gestural drawing. For Motherwell, however, the ready-made shape became an alternative to the gestural paint mark, permitting faster and freer construction and thus accelerated automatic expression.

The work shown here belongs to a series from 1944-47, modeled loosely after Picasso's 1938 drawing, Woman in an Armchair. Reversing history, Motherwell worked his way back in the series from a synthetic to an analytic mode of construction, crossing the threshold of emphasis in 1945. These analytic collages, a form unknown to the cubists who discovered the medium only as a synthetic process, evolved by 1948 into Motherwell's first abstract expressionist works.

Common to the analytic phase of cubism, the 'figure' in this work occupies a shallow pictorial space that breaks down the more tautly flattened surface of later synthetic cubism. Far less common to orthodox cubism of any sort is the radical cropping of the triangular 'arm' that locks the image behind the frame. Where the bottom of the arm only seems to underlie the next piece, but is in fact cut to fit, there is possibly a comment made on picture-making that belongs to the cubist tradition at large. An additional double play occurs where the paint rag 'head' makes a Duchampian self-reference to the image-painter cum object maker. In short, while this work primarily shows an effort to come to terms with cubist at its roots, it also belongs to a larger confrontation with European influences that migrated to New York en masse with the war.  

The war's further impact may be reflected in the color change in the upper right area, originally a Mexican arte popular turquoise, but modified to a brown that works like camouflage with the olive drab arm. The triangulated shapes might also stem from the war via the prevalence of 'V' forms in Motherwell's work during these years. But the war is no doubt equally present in its absence, given Motherwell's critique of the most topical work of the era: "Guernica hangs in an uneasy equilibrium between now disappearing social values, i.e., moral indignation at the character of modern life...as opposed to the eternal and the formal, the aesthetics of the papier colle."