Robert Motherwell Biography and Artwork

born Aberdeen, WA (USA) 1915 died Provincetown, MA (USA) 1991

Throughout his prolific career Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) produced a remarkable body of work. Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Stanford and art in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1938 after a year of graduate work at Harvard, Motherwell studied painting in Paris. He returned to New York in 1940 and settled in Greenwich Village. In 1941 he abandoned his academic studies to paint full time and by 1942 had been introduced to many of the abstract expressionists of New York. Motherwell created his first collages at Jackson Pollock's studio in Greenwich Village and along with Pollock and others, was invited to exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery. For the next fifteen years, Motherwell traveled extensively, taught art, and developed his style of painting, drawing and collage. During this period he participated in one man and group exhibitions at galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1961 Motherwell began making limited edition prints. He was the only one of the original abstract expressionists to enthusiastically embrace printmaking. Motherwell worked with numerous print workshops in the US and Europe. The collaborative aspect of printmaking gave the artist great satisfaction and he went on to produce more than 500 editions over the next thirty years.

Select Timeline

• 1926 - Receives scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles
• 1930 - Begins a self-directed education in art, learning to draw by copying Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, Rembrandt's portraits, and Peter Rubens' Marie de Medici series from book illustrations.
• 1932 - Begins college at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, majoring in art.
• 1935 - Travels to Europe.
• 1936 - Enrols at Harvard University. Continues to study art.
• 1936 - Attends a rally in San Francisco at which Andre Malraux speaks about the Spanish Civil War
• 1938 - Travels to Paris to research Delacroix's writing and enrols at the University of Grenoble to study French.
• 1938 - In France, becomes interested in the works of Pablo Picasso.
• 1939 - Is given his first exhibition of twelve paintings at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris.
• 1940 - Returns to the United States and accepts a one-year teaching post at the University of Oregon
• 1941 - Travels to Mexico and spends the summer in Taxco with Matta and his wife.
• 1942 - Despite his challenging relationship with Surrealists, is invited - along with William Baziotes, Joseph Cornell, and David Hare - to participate in First Papers of Surrealism.
• 1943 - Constructs his first collage with Jackson Pollock in Pollock's Greenwich Village studio
• 1944 - Makes the collage Mallarmes Swan.

Select Exhibitions

• 2004 - Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Das MoMA in Berlin
• 2004 - Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Robert Motherwell and Frank Stella: Prints from the Permanent Collection
• 2004 - 2003 Warsaw, Zentrum fur Zeitgenossische Kunst Schloss Ujazdowski, Von Picasso bis Warhol
• 2004 - Kassel, Documenta 2, 3 1944 New York, Art of This Century
• 2003 - Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich
• 2003 - Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Robert Motherwell

Select Artwork

• Creature, 1973
• Study in Watercolor #3, 1968
• Barcelona Elegy for the Spanish Republic, 1991
• Lines for St. Gallen, 1971
• Yellow Flight, 1986
• Hermitage, 1975

Quotes

• "Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."
• "In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception.. to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best.. better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever.. Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work."
• "The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with."
• "Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."

Publications

• Robert Motherwell - by Mary Ann Caws (Author), Robert Motherwell, Columbia University Press (April 15, 1996)
• Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush (Reaktion Books - Essays in Art and Culture) - by Mary Ann Caws, Reaktion Books (April 3, 2004)
• The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) - by Robert Motherwell, University of California Press; 1 edition (November 16, 1999)

Quick Facts

• Robert Motherwell 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.
• He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937
• 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.

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