Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, Iberia #18, 1958
Oil on linen mounted on a paperboard support
5 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter andprintmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also includedJackson 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 inphilosophy 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 withturpentine 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 essaysForm and Sense in 1945 as the first Number of Problems of Contemporary Art.