Robert Motherwell

(click to enlarge)
Motherwell, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1959 (credit: © Arnold Newman)

(born Jan. 24, 1915, Aberdeen, Wash., U.S. — died July 16, 1991, Provincetown, Mass.) U.S. painter, writer, and teacher. He received an art scholarship at 11, but he earned degrees from Stanford and Harvard before deciding to become a serious painter. He espoused Abstract Expressionism from the beginning of his career, and his erudite writings were largely responsible for the intellectual tone of the movement. In his Elegy to the Spanish Republic painting series, begun in 1949 and continued over three decades, he developed a limited repertory of simple, serene black forms that were applied to the picture plane in a way that created a sense of slow, solemn movement. Though he worked in various styles, his reputation rests on his pioneering work as a founder and principal exponent of Abstract Expressionism.

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American artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was one of the founders and last surviving members of the path-breaking Abstract Expressionist movement in painting.

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in January 1915. He pursued an extensive liberal arts education before he fully committed himself to painting. He received his bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University, where he studied between 1932 and 1937, with a year away at the California School of Fine Arts. He did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University in 1937-1938; he attended the University of Grenoble in the summer of 1938 and did more graduate work at Columbia University in 1940-1941, this time in art history. His interest in painting persisted through these years. He was largely self-taught.

Motherwell began painting only after completing his academic studies. Early in his career, he was attracted to Surrealist notions of tapping into the unconscious as a source of imagery, a method called "psychic automatism." As he put it, "You don't have to paint a figure to express human feelings. The game is not what things look like. The game is organizing as accurately and with as deep discrimination as one can, states of feeling, and states of feeling … become questions of light, color, weight, solidity, airiness, lyricism, whatever." He shared with other founders of Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko) the conviction that the source of art was in untrammeled inner reality, rather than in observed actuality. Painting was a process of self-discovery and self-revelation, and a picture was evidence of that search. This new movement in art was highly successful, and because of his ease with matters intellectual, Motherwell served as Abstract Expressionism's unofficial spokesman.

While in the 1940's ex-patriate Surrealists in New York took young Motherwell's work seriously, and while he was friends with the Chilean Surrealist Matta, he wasn't interested in the look of Surrealist art. Motherwell's heros were Céezanne, Picasso, Mondrian, and especially Matisse. He regarded these influences as inevitable. "My father had a vineyard in the Napa Valley [in California]. I grew up in a landscape not at all dissimilar to Provence, or to the central plateau of Spain, or to parts of Italy and the Mediterranean basin."

In drawing, Motherwell invented his own elegant calligraphy fluid diagrams of emotional states as well as testimony to a faultless sense of placement. Drawing was primary; color was but a means of carrying content. "Generally, I use few colors," he said, "yellow ochre, ver-million, orange, cadmium green, ultramarine blue. Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic: ochre for the earth, green for the grass, blue for the sky and sea. I guess that black and white, which I use most often, tend to be protagonists."

In his collages there is vivid evidence of his life-long love of things French, and of his delight in anything Mediterranean. They show clearly the basis of his art in French modernism, his enthusiasm for French poetry, food, even for the color of French cigarette wrappers (Gauloise blue). For Motherwell, the collages "are a kind of private diary, not made with an actual autobiographical intention, but one that functions in an associative way for me."

Motherwell enjoyed a long and successful career of national and international exhibitions. His first one-man show took place at Peggy Guggenheim's adventurous "Art of This Century" gallery in New York. He exhibited at the Kootz Gallery during the late 1940's, at the Sidney Janis Gallery through the 1950's and early 1960's, and at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in the late 1960's. His work also was featured in important international exhibitions, including the São Paulo and Venice biennials and the Brussels World's Fair. In the 1990's his works were on exhibition in New York galleries, in several other American states, and in other countries.

Motherwell's best known images are probably the Spanish Elegies, the first of which appeared in 1948. Originally, he intended them as a tribute to the short-lived Spanish Republic, but they preoccupied him off and on until his death. He said the Elegies were "also general metaphors of the contract between life and death, and their interrelation." Most of these works were executed in black and white. Another series of paintings called the Opens came from seeing a small canvas in the studio leaning against a larger one; the series is "severely geometric."

Motherwell's rich intellectual background consistently found expression outside the studio. In 1947-1948 he co-edited the cultural magazine Possibilities. With William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, he founded an art school, "Subjects of the Artist," in 1948. In 1951 he edited The Dada Painters and Poets, a major anthology of the early 20th-century movement, which helped to inspire the revival of Dada during the late 1950's and early 1960's. (Harvard University issued a second edition of this work in 1989.) Between 1951 and 1957 he taught at Hunter College, and in the mid-1960s he served as art director for the Partisan Review. He was also a brilliant speaker and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

In 1961 Motherwell began making limited editions of his work. He was the only one of the original abstract expressionists to take up printmaking. He combined his unique abstract style with the materials and technical requirements of printmaking to create more than 200 editions over the next 30 years. Robert Motherwell died in July, 1991.

Further Reading

For works by Motherwell, see The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, which he edited in 1951 (second edition, 1989) and Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (1992). For recent collections of his work, with commentaries, see Stephanie Terenzio, The Prints of Robert Motherwell, David Rosand (ed.) Robert Motherwell on Paper: Drawing, Prints, Collages (1997), Stephanie Terenzio, Robert Motherwell and Black (1980); for critical works, see Robert S. Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (1987), Mary Ann Caws, Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds (1996).

Quotes:

"The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with."

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Robert Motherwell
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, Robert Motherwell 1971
Born	January 24, 1915(1915-01-24) Aberdeen, Washington
Died	July 16, 1991 (aged 76)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Printmaking
Training	Stanford University, Harvard, Columbia University
Movement	Abstract expressionism

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.

Books

• Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, R. Motherwell, New York, 1951.
• Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press, 1999.
• Robert Motherwell translated to English Paul Signac's book, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, 1938.

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 238-241
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 11; p. 16; p. 27; p. 38; p. 258-261

External links

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• Robert Motherwell Biography: Hollis Taggart Galleries

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