Robert Motherwell (1915–91) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, printmaker, collagist, professor, writer, and editor who viewed painting as “a state of anxiety that is obliquely recorded in the inner tensions of the finished canvas.” His facility with words positioned Motherwell to be the leading spokesman of the postwar New York School, which he promoted through lectures, books—he created the Documents of Modern Art series and edited The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1951)—and teaching at Black Mountain College, Oberlin College, Brown University, and Hunter College.
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Motherwell took to art early, winning a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of 12. He received a bachelor of arts from Stanford University and completed graduate work in aesthetics at Harvard University before moving to New York to study with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University in 1940. Through Schapiro and others, Motherwell met American painters from 1930s Works Progress Administration projects and European surrealists fleeing Nazism. He embraced the Surrealist technique of “psychic automatism,” calling it “artful scribbling” and using it in all of his subsequent work. In 1943, Motherwell was invited, along with Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and others, to contribute to the first American exhibition of collages at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. The following year, in 1944, Motherwell enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the Art of This Century Gallery, as well as his first sale to The Museum of Modern Art. In Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943), the painting that MoMa acquired in 1944, one can see the beginnings of the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” motif that Motherwell developed in 1948 and would repeat in more than 100 of his canvases. Originally a tribute to the democratically elected Spanish government that fell to General Francisco Franco in 1939, the “Elegy” paintings were described by the artist as “general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation.”
In 1981, Motherwell established the Dedalus Foundation to ensure that his values of modernism, arts education, visual literacy, and scholarship would continue beyond his lifetime. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1989. At the time of his death, in 1991, Motherwell was still working and exhibiting. His work is held in major collections across the world, and he has been the subject of exhibitions and retrospectives at institutions that include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (1965–66, traveled; 1965–67, traveled, 1969); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York (1972; 2015); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (1976–77); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1983–85, traveled); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York (1984–85; 2013–14); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1996); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (1996–97); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2013–14); and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts (1983; 2012; 2015), among others.
Motherwell exhibited with GRAY in the group exhibition Prints/New Works, 1976.
