Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He studied Philosophy at Harvard and Stanford and art in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1938, after a year of graduate work at Harvard, Motherwell studied painting in Paris.

He returned to New York in 1940 when he met William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Familiar with contemporary French culture, Motherwell participated in the activities of the European Surrealists in exile in the United States, and he was active in the transformation and assimilation of European Surrealism by artists of The New York School. He wrote extensively about art and artists and was the editor of the important series Documents of Modern Art. Motherwell’s early works were influenced by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Miró.

In 1946, he turned away from Surrealist ideas to a style that was quasi-figurative with poetic abstract symbols. In 1949, he began a series of paintings titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic that were to become central to his body of work. Frieze-like sequences of alternating vertical planes and biomorphic ovals in black and white, the Elegies are dramatic and universal reflections on the brutality of political conflict. After 1950, Motherwell created large-scale paintings with monumental yet lyrical imagery. Once married to the influential painter Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell is considered to have been a leading member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists.