Review: A heroic Robert Motherwell survey at the Fort Worth Modern

FORT WORTH — If mad Ireland hurt W.B. Yeats into poetry, as W.H. Auden averred, the rise of fascism and World War II stirred up defiant new energies in the visual arts. Thanks to European artists fleeing oppression and destruction, a lot of those energies landed on these shores, in turn challenging American artists to find new modes of expression. In the 1940s, as Robert Hughes has written, there were more modern masterpieces by European artists to be seen in New York than anywhere else. Centered in New York, a powerful artistic reaction was what soon was dubbed abstract expressionism….