Motion II was painted between 1980 and 1981, when Goodnough was in his midsixties and at the height of the collage influenced style he had developed through the 1970s. A large constellation of fragmented white and off-white shapes, the torn and cut forms that had defined his mature practice since the late 1960s, drifts across a warm grey brown ground, trailing drips and paint marks that fix the image in the physical act of its making. Each fragment carries traces of earlier passages of paint: flicks of red, blue, green visible beneath or along the edges, the accumulated history of the studio visible at close range. The composition reads simultaneously as a flock of birds, a murmuration, shattered glass, and pure abstraction that’s held in deliberate ambiguity. Goodnough was a first-generation presence in the New York School, included in the legendary 9th Street Show of 1951 and a close contemporary of de Kooning, Rothko, and Frankenthaler. In 1964 Time magazine named him one of the hundred most important artists in the United States.