From early on, though, Motherwell displayed an affinity for more intellectual and creative pursuits, and his early education included a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
Before he devoted himself entirely to art practice, Motherwell received an extensive education in philosophy, literature and art history. He began his studies at Stanford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1937.
After graduation, he began a Doctor of Philosophy program in philosophy at Harvard, but his studies were interrupted by a yearlong European trip which he embarked upon in 1938, and during which he fell in love with European modernism.
It was only at his father's insistence that he chose a stable occupation which led him to study art history at Columbia University in 1940, instead of immediately beginning his career as an artist.
It was only at his father's insistence that he chose a stable occupation which led him to study art history at Columbia University in 1940, instead of immediately beginning his career as an artist.
After graduation, he began a Doctor of Philosophy program in philosophy at Harvard, but his studies were interrupted by a yearlong European trip which he embarked upon in 1938, and during which he fell in love with European modernism.
From early on, though, Motherwell displayed an affinity for more intellectual and creative pursuits, and his early education included a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
Before he devoted himself entirely to art practice, Motherwell received an extensive education in philosophy, literature and art history. He began his studies at Stanford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1937.
Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, into the family of Robert Burns and Margaret (Hogan) Motherwell, but he would spend much of his childhood in the dry environs of central California, where he was sent in an effort to relieve his severe asthma. The son of a well-to-do and conservative bank chairman, Motherwell was expected to follow in his father's footsteps.
From early on, though, Motherwell displayed an affinity for more intellectual and creative pursuits, and his early education included a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Before he devoted himself entirely to art practice, Motherwell received an extensive education in philosophy, literature and art history. He began his studies at Stanford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1937. There he encountered the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the work of French symbolist poets, and these twin inspirations helped to open Motherwell's mind to the possibilities of abstraction in writing and art. After graduation, he began a Doctor of Philosophy program in philosophy at Harvard, but his studies were interrupted by a yearlong European trip which he embarked upon in 1938, and during which he fell in love with European modernism. It was only at his father's insistence that he chose a stable occupation which led him to study art history at Columbia University in 1940, instead of immediately beginning his career as an artist.
Motherwell's time at Columbia, however, proved to be significant for his artistic development. Upon his arrival to New York, he fell in with the circle of painters who would make up the core of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Another powerful influence was art historian Meyer Schapiro, who was then teaching at Columbia. Schapiro encouraged Motherwell's painting and introduced him to the group of European Surrealists living in New York at the time. He was deeply impressed by their notion of automatism - the idea that art might be a manifestation of the artist's subconscious - and it would become a central tenet of his work.
Motherwell's first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen and ink drawings, collectively called the "Mexican Sketchbook", show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell's career then received a jump-start in 1943 when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.
In the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York's Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential “Documents of Modern Art” series, the publication “Possibilities”, and “The Dada Painters and Poets” anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.
The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series - the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known - began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called “At Five in the Afternoon”, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression, and resistance.
Composed between 1953-1957, the artist's second major group of work is called the “Je t'aime” series, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the “Elegies” paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell's collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist's interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.
Motherwell began his third major series, the “Opens”, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct - in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field - in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.
Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As arguably the most eloquent and intellectually accomplished of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell's legacy is significant not only for the importance of his paintings, but also for the breadth and influence of his writing, editing and teaching. Yet, it is first and foremost in the artist's work - which both bridged and challenged the duel influences of European and American Modernism, and which, despite its interest in formal dialogues, never neglected the necessity of human empathy - that Motherwell's legacy will continue to endure.
Open No. 121 (Bolton Landing Elegy)
Africa 2
Beside the Sea
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110
Beside the Sea No. 20
Beside the Sea No. 45
Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive
Untitled D (From The Basque Suite)
The Blue Painting Lesson: A Study in Painterly Logic, number one of five
Open No. 122 in Scarlet and Blue
The Scarlet Ring
Africa 7
From the Lyric Suite
Africa 10
Beside the Sea No. 22
Africa 6
At Five in the Afternoon
Beside the Sea No. 64
No. 5 (From London Series I)
Beside the Sea No. 24
Yellow Music
Africa 5
Poet (1)
Beside the Sea No. 2
Ulysses
Beside the Sea No. 1
Beside the Sea No. 18
No. 13 (From The Basque Suite)
Africa 8
Untitled (From Ten Works by Ten Painters)
Untitled A (From The Basque Suite)
Africa 4
No. 4 (From The Basque Suite)
The Figure 4 on an Elegy
Mallarme's Swan
Beside the Sea No. 15
Je t'aime No.2
Tobacco Roth-Handle
Iberia No. 2
No. 7 (From The Basque Suite)
No. 8 (From The Basque Suite)
Untitled C (From The Basque Suite)
Untitled B (From The Basque Suite)
Africa 9
Blue Elegy
Africa 3
No. 13 (From London Series I)
Untitled
Africa 1
No. 12 (From The Basque Suite)
Much in the tradition of other artist/critics like Fairfield Porter, Motherwell sought to simplify the process of art criticism by offering a very basic, albeit somewhat unorthodox, explanation. According to Motherwell, there were no concrete answers, only questions, discussions and conflicts. Within all modern and abstract art, there was one unifying factor: the Modern artist rejected, in one form or another, the standards of society.
Several philosophical viewpoints that informed Motherwell's writings, but none did so more than Existentialism. For him, the creation of abstract art was a personal journey and the result of a personal crisis. He viewed the conditions of modern society as having a direct consequence on the Abstract Expressionist's fundamental evolution.
The Existentialist notions of alienation, absurdity, personal angst and meaninglessness, frequently found their way into Motherwell's writings, and he took great pleasure in keeping the company of likeminded artists and writers, including Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, and Helen Frankenthaler. In the tradition of Marx, Motherwell wished to reject the constraints of living in bourgeois society, and he viewed modern social conditions as wholly adverse to those which nurtured abstract artists.
The modern artist's function, according to Motherwell, was a deceptively complex one: to exist in a constant readiness to create something new. This also meant that the artist had to be able to express the needs of modern society, which were exponentially shifting.
Quotations:
"Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science."
"The middle-class is decaying, and as a conscious entity the working-class does not exist."
"The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd."
"The social condition of the modern world which gives every experience its form is the spiritual breakdown which followed the collapse of religion. This condition has led to the isolation of the artist from the rest of society. The modern artist's social history is that of a spiritual being in a property-loving world."
Robert Motherwell met aspiring actress and writer Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros in 1941 and they got married the same year. The couple separated in 1949. In 1950, he married Betty Little and the couple had two daughters. However, the relationship ended in a divorce. In 1958, he married painter Helen Frankenthaler, and this relationship lasted till 1971, once again ending in a divorce. In 1970, he married photographer and artist Renate Pensold.
