Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.
Robert Motherwell
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57,1957-60
Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.
Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell’s father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. Robert Motherwell received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history, studying under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. His rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Without his tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract expressionists like Rothko, who was extremely shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye. Motherwell’s collected writings are a truly exceptional window into the abstract expressionist world. He was a lucid and engaging writer, and his essays are considered a bridge for those who want to learn more about non-representational art but who are put off by dense art criticism.
Motherwell spent significant time in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cy Twombly studied under him.
Motherwell’s greatest goal was to use the staging of his work to convey to the viewer the mental and physical engagement of the artist with the canvas. He preferred using the starkness of black paint as one of the basic elements of his paintings. He was known to frequently employ the technique of diluting his paint with turpentine to create a shadow effect. His long-running series of paintings “Elegies for the Spanish Republic” is generally considered his most significant project.
Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor of Wolfgang Paalens journal Dyn, which was edited 1942-44 in six numbers. He also edited Paalens collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first Number of Problems of Contemporary Art.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth houses the largest collection of Motherwell’s works. The Walker Art Center also has a nearly-complete collection of his prints. The Empire State Plaza holds some of his work.
He was married to artist Helen Frankenthaler as his third wife, but was subsequently divorced from Frankenthaler.
Robert Motherwell
Two Figures 1958
Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington and began to study painting at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1926 when he was only 11. Family money offered him a comprehensive education: a BA in philosophy at Stanford, a pre-war tour of Europe and PhD studies in philosophy at Harvard eventually abandoned to enrol on an art history course at Columbia run by art historian Meyer Schapiro. And it was Schapiro who persuaded Motherwell to take up painting professionally. He studied painting with the Chilean Surrealist Matta in Mexico in 1941.
His first solo exhibition was in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art Of This Century Gallery. He was the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists, and was unusual in that he produced work which was abstract from the outset, although there is a suggestion of figuration in his paintings. Despite comprising only a fraction of his output,
Motherwell’s best known work is the ‘Spanish Elegies’ collection prompted by the Spanish Civil War, an event that moved him deeply but not begun until a decade later in 1949.
In 1948 Motherwell, together with other leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, founded the Subjects of the Artist School. His earliest paintings contained ideas prompted by his friendship with a number of expatriate Surrealists, but by the late 1940s he turned to using bold slabs of paint, often ovals or upright rectangles in a very subdued palette reminiscent of the late Matisse cutouts. This technique, making dramatic use of black and white continued for some time. It can be seen to good effect in ‘Elegy to the Spanish Republic LXX’ (1961). In 1967 he changed tack, beginning a series of Colour Field paintings called ‘Open’. They featured large areas of dense colour broken by a few spare lines, a style chosen to convey both expansiveness and simplicity.
Motherwell was highly prolific both as an artist and as a critic and lecturer. His understanding of various different styles inform a lot of his art – Surrealism within his early work and his later collages such as ‘Unglueckliche Liebe’ (‘Unhappy Love’) (1975) and Abstract Expressionism clearly evident in ‘Elegies’. However, he always retains an understanding of the world around him, conveying a sense of humanity as opposed to cold intellectualism.
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell was born January 4, 1915, in Aberdeen, Washington. He was awarded a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles at age 11, and in 1932 studied painting briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Motherwell received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1937 and enrolled for graduate work later that year in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He traveled to Europe in 1938 for a year of study abroad. His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris in 1939.
In September of 1940, Motherwell settled in New York, where he entered Columbia University to study art history with Meyer Schapiro, who encouraged him to become a painter. In 1941, Motherwell traveled to Mexico with Roberto Matta for six months. After returning to New York, his circle came to include William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock. In 1942, Motherwell was included in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York. In 1944, Motherwell became editor of the Documents of Modern Art series of books, and he contributed frequently to the literature on Modern art from that time.
A solo exhibition of Motherwell’s work was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, New York, in 1944. In 1946, he began to associate with Herbert Ferber, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and spent his first summer in East Hampton, Long Island. This year, Motherwell was given solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he participated in Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist subsequently taught and lectured throughout the United States, and continued to exhibit extensively in the United States and abroad. A Motherwell exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle D�sseldorf, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976–77. He was given important solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1978. A retrospective of his works organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, traveled in the United States from 1983 to 1985. From 1971, the artist lived and worked in Greenwich, Connecticut. He died July 16, 1991, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_116.html
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