This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  American painter, Robert Motherwell, was one of the founders
and principal exponents of Abstract Expressionism, who was among the
first American artists to cultivate accidental elements in his work. A
precocious youth, Motherwell received a scholarship to study art when
he was 11 years old. He preferred academic studies, however, and
eventually took degrees in aesthetics from Stanford and Harvard
universities.
Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only
in 1941. Although he was especially influenced by the Surrealist
artists; Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson; he remained largely
self-taught. His early work followed no single style but already
contained motifs from which much of his later art grew. He received his
first one-man show in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century
Gallery in New York City. In the mid-1940s Motherwell painted abstract
figurative works that showed the influence of Surrealism. But in 1949
he painted the first in a series of works collectively entitled "Elegy
to the Spanish Republic." He painted almost 150 versions of these
"Elegies" in the next three decades. These Abstract Expressionist
paintings show his continuous development of a limited repertory of
simple, serene, and massive forms that are applied in black paint to
the picture plane in such a way that they generate a sense of slow,
solemnly suggestive movement.
During the 1960s he painted in
several different styles, so that such paintings as Africa (1964, 65;
Baltimore Museum of Art) look like enlarged details of elegant
calligraphy, while Indian Summer, #2 (1962, 64) combines the bravura
brush-work typical of Abstract Expressionism with the broad areas of
evenly applied color characteristic of the then-emerging Color Field
Painting style. By the end of the decade, paintings in his Open
series (1967, 69), he had abandoned Abstract Expressionism in favor of the
new style.
From 1958 to 1971 Motherwell was married to the
American painter Helen Frankenthaler. He taught art at Hunter College
(1951, 58, 1971, 72), directed the publication of the series "The
Documents of Modern Art" (1944, 52), and wrote numerous essays on art
and aesthetics. He was generally regarded as the most articulate
spokesman for Abstract Expressionism.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Robert
Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, of Scotch-Irish ancestry;
the son of a bank president who moved the family to San Francisco when
Robert was a child. At the precocious age of eleven he received a
scholarship to Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He earned his
bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from Stanford University
and worked on his doctorate from Harvard, afterwards studying at the
University of Grenoble in France and at Columbia University.
Motherwell
was a man respected not only for his art but also for his writings,
scholarship and personal presence. He was the last, the youngest, of
the Abstract Expressionists which included Willem de Kooning, Adolph
Gottlieb and Clyfford Still. He was an acknowledged master of the
medium of collage. He painted in series, a group of paintings of
similar technique and colors, like his Spanish Elegies.
From
1958 to 1971 he was married to his third wife, Helen Frankenthaler. His
fourth wife was Renate Ponsold, an artist-photographer; they had two
daughters and one grandchild. They lived in Greenwich, Connecticut in a
carriage house with a hayloft aerie, a beautiful old barn and a guest
cottage adjoining a one-hundred foot long studio.
He died on
July 18, 1991. He had suffered a stroke at his summer home in
Provincetown, Massachusetts and died on his way to the hospital.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Los Angeles Times obituary on July 18, 1991
Newsweek Magazine, January 2, 1984
Time Magazine, July 17, 1972
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Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, M-Q):
|  Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)
The youngest member of the circle of first generation Abstract Expressionist painters, Robert Motherwell was unique in this group for his extensive writings on art as well as his prolific printmaking. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell grew up intending to become a philosopher and received a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Stanford University before heading east for graduate study at Harvard. As a child Motherwell’s artistic talent was encouraged with a scholarship for study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, but he did not begin painting seriously until embarking on a year of European travel in 1938.
In 1941, after traveling to Mexico with Chilean surrealist Matta Echaurren, Motherwell decided to paint full time and moved to Greenwich Village. During this decade, he was most influenced by European surrealists, including Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and André Masson. Interested in the unconscious mind, Motherwell explored theories of automatism by creating free-association collages that he sometimes used as underpinnings for future painting compositions. Automatism also offered Motherwell “an active principle for painting, specifically designed to explore unknown possibilities.”(1) Experimenting with this technique, Motherwell developed a loose yet vigorous brushwork that resonated with emotion.
Motherwell’s art displayed his passion for history, literature, and the human condition. From the beginning he strove to evoke a moral and political experience through his art. As an example, the artist drew on the writing of James Joyce for titles to his paintings, drawings, and prints throughout his career. A poem by Spanish poet Frederico García Lorca gave him the theme of the Elegy to the Spanish Republic, which Motherwell explored in over 200 works.
Motherwell met William Baziotes in 1942 and quickly gained entry to the group of New York artists who would become known as Abstract Expressionists. In 1943, art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim invited Motherwell, along with Jackson Pollock and Baziotes, to contribute work to an all-collage group show. The following year, Motherwell had his first one-man show at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery.
In the late 1960s, Motherwell began his Open series, a striking departure from his gestural paintings. Typically fields of color marked with faint charcoal lines suggesting a door or a window, the Open paintings were originally inspired by the sight of a small canvas leaning against a larger one. For the rest of his career, Motherwell painted in both expressive and austere modes, in addition to creating collages and collaborating with printmakers to make limited edition prints.
Motherwell died suddenly at his home in Provincetown in the summer of 1991 and worked productively up to the end. By this time, his career had been widely celebrated and examined with exhibitions not only at Museum of Modern Art in New York, but also at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., the Royal Academy in London, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City (this opened posthumously).
1) David Rosand, ed. Robert Motherwell on Paper. (New York: Abrams, 1977), p.14.
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Biography from Rogallery.com:
| A leading exponent of American abstract expressionism, Robert Motherwell has served as a vital spokesman for the avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century. He introduced the term "abstract expressionism into the United States, and helped crystallize the direction of the new movement with his painting and writing.
An abstractionist from the beginning of his career, Motherwell worked primarily in the medium of collages. His best-known works-more than 100 canvases, including monumental oil paintings and small drawings-are represented under the series title "Elegies to the Spanish Republic."
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Motherwell studied at the Otis Institute and the California School of Fine Arts, before moving permanently to the Fast coast as a young man. He studied philosophy at Harvard and art history at Columbia, deciding at age 26 to become a painter. In 1942, following a trip to Mexico, he settled in New York City to begin professional painting.
Deeply influenced by the modernist European painters who gathered in New York during World War II, particularly Chilean surrealist Matta Echaurren, Motherwell began experimenting with surrealism and automatism, evolving his own unique style. With a technique he called "plastic automatism," Motherwell created images and collages by free association, on which he imposed a later formal composition. His early work, architecturally structured, is reminiscent of Mondrian; later productions were done with freer brushwork.
In the course of a long and prolific career, Motherwell tried his hand at a wide variety of styles, including drip-and-spatter expressionism and color-field combinations. But, for the most part, his abstractionism remains carefully structured, with a tendency toward geometric images. The "elegies" theme, done almost exclusively in black and white, has black ovoid shapes suspended between vertical panels.
Motherwell found his medium in 1943 when noted art patron Peggy Guggenheim asked three American artists, including Motherwell, to contribute to the first all-collage show held in this country. Motherwell set to work with paper, scissors and paste, an experience that galvanized him to adopt collage as his continuing mode of expression. One year later, he held his first one-man show at the Art of This Century Gallery. Since then, he has been included in every major exhibition of American abstract art. |
Biography from Jerald Melberg Gallery:
| Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) is unquestionably one of the most
significant American artists of the twentieth century. Like the
other Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell rejected conventional
realism. Instead he was interested in exploring a reality that
went beyond the recognizable image. Motherwell had a particular
fascination and preference for working with paper. He also felt
that his involvement with printmaking was just as important and vital
to his work as his collages or paintings on canvas.
Motherwell's first major retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York in 1965. Since then, he has been honored with
retrospectives by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York,
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in
New York, among many others. |
Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| Robert Motherwell was a pioneer in Abstract Expressionism, the first painting movement after World War II and the first to bring international attention to American artists. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, to Robert Burns Motherwell and Margaret Hogan Motherwell. His family moved to California in 1918 and the following year to Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1926, the family moved back to California where Motherwell attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles on a scholarship. In 1929, he attended prep school in Atascadero, in central California, where the climate was less adverse to his asthma.
After graduating from prep school, he studied for a brief period at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, although he received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937. For the next year and a half, he attended the graduate school of philosophy at Harvard University. In 1938, he left for France, where he studied French literature and devoted himself to painting.
Motherwell’s first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Duncan in Paris.
Motherwell returned to New York in 1940, where he studied art history at Columbia University before traveling to Mexico. In 1944, Peggy Guggenheim granted him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York. The following year Motherwell moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, New York, where set up a painting studio and at the same time began to write about Modern Art. In 1950, Motherwell was appointed to the graduate faculty at Hunter College in New York.
He moved back to New York City in 1953, and began to spend summers painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1970, he again moved, this time to Greenwich, Connecticut, but he continued to maintain a studio house in Provincetown.
Along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell developed an expressionistic aesthetic that reflected the confusing and uncertain years during and immediately following World War II. At that time, the American art scene was entwined in an assortment of realist, impressionist and abstract movements. While European Modernism influenced many artists during the years following the Armory Show (the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory) of 1913, "an impression of emptiness [and] despair prevailed."(1)
In the mid-1940's Americans were confronted with an entirely new set of issues that called for an original—and uniquely American—style. An innovative new movement—Abstract Expressionism—emerged, in which artists experimented with both large scale and explosive gesture. They wedded the constructive and fluid elements of abstract form with the intensity and dynamism of the urban experience. Motherwell and his colleagues held to the conviction that a work of art serves as a vehicle for personal emancipation to which the artist is committed with his or her total character.
Motherwell painted in the early 1960s a series of works of sky and water as part of an experiment the artist conducted over several years, beginning with a group of small oil he completed in Provincetown in 1961, titled Beside the Sea. He finished this episode with Lyric Suite, a monumental series of nearly six hundred ink drawings he painted on rice paper in 1965. H.H. Arnason notes that in these works the artist begins exploring the possibilities of a spontaneous, intuitively conceived brush gesture.(2)
The Provincetown studio location inspired Motherwell to recreate the spontaneity of the waves splashing on his back porch at high tide. Outside his house, the waves crash violently against the lower wall causing streams of water to vault into the air, where they double back, creating large ovals in space. As Dore Ashton observes, the artist's intention was to re-create and not specifically illustrate this water effect: "All of his paintings are oblique metaphors, and hold fast to the Mallarméan rule that things must be suggested or evoked, and not described."(3) This body of the artist's work clearly demonstrates that Motherwell realized—and helped to define—the very heart of Modernism: that the artist is constantly re-discovering, re-inventing and re-creating the world.
Jack Flam points out that the Renaissance notion of pictorial space, in which the canvas is seen as a window, is gradually "filled in" by the impressionists and early Modernists. Paintings came to function as "a wall on which marks have been made… Motherwell's painting, right from the beginning of his career, was conceived of in this way, as a kind of wall."(4)
Robert Motherwell was among the most literate and articulate of the Abstract Expressionists. He wrote extensively about modern art and in his work he became an interpreter of Modern literature. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, by the great twentieth century writer James Joyce, have played a crucial role in the "subject" of his paintings. Motherwell often painted in a monumental scale while exploring an intimate, personal expression. His style altered between the strict, linear structure of Piet Mondrian and the more biomorpohic, amorphous expression evidenced in the work of Jean Miro.
Robert Motherwell's work was included in the many important exhibitions of modern art during his lifetime, including Fourteen Americans; The New American Painting and Four Abstract Expressionists at the Museum of Modern Art. His paintings, drawings, prints and collages were featured in retrospective exhibitions in Fort Worth; Buffalo; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Amsterdam; London; Brussels; Essen and Munich, Germany; Torino, Italy; Edinburgh; Mexico City and Monterey, Mexico; and Barcelona and Madrid.
Motherwell was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1969. In 1979, he was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, a nd in 1980, he was granted the Medal of Merit from the University of Salamanca. He received the Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture from the City of New York in 1981. In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the MacDowell Colony Medal of Honor and the Great Artists Series Award at New York University. In the following year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded the Medalla de Ore de Belles Artes in Madrid, Spain. The French Ministry of Culture elected him Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988. In 1989, Motherwell received the Harvard University Centennial Medal and in 1990 (the year before his death), President George H. Bush honored him by awarding him the National Medal of Arts.(5)
Footnotes:
1. Dore Ashton, quoted by Marcelin Pleynet, collection editor, Robert Motherwell: Histoire et Philosophie de l'Art, (Paris: Edition Daniel Papierski, 1989), 11, from Robert Motherwell, "Artistes parisiens en exil, New York 1939-45" in Paris-New York, catalogue Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977. We are appreciative to the staff and trustees of the Dadelus Foundation for their support, generosity and assistance.
2. H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982), 64.
3. Dore Ashton, "Robert Motherwell: The Painter and His Poets," introduction to H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982), 8.
4. Jack Flam, Motherwell (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1991), 26.
5. Biographical information on Robert Motherwell was gathered from Jack Flam, Motherwell (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1991), 29-30.
Submitted by the Staff of the Columbus Museum |
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