Robert Motherwell
American, 1915-1991
Robert Motherwell,1915 – 1991, was an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, a phrase he coined.
Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915.. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. Due to the artist's asthmatic condition, Motherwell was reared largely on the Pacific Coast and spent most of his school years in California. There he developed a love for the broad spaces and bright colors that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract paintings. His later concern with themes of mortality can likewise be traced to his frail health as a child.
Between 1932 and 1937, Motherwell briefly studied painting at California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco and received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University. At Stanford Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of symbolist and other literature.This passion stayed with Motherwell for the rest of his life and became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings.
From Motherwell's own words, the reason he went to Harvard was because he wanted to be a painter, while his father urged him to pursue a more secure career: "And finally after months of really a cold war he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then—it was actually the last year—Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."
In 1940, Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Shapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (Max Ernst, Duchamp, Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with Kurt Seligmann.
After a 1941 voyage with Roberto Matta to Mexico, Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings It was Matta who introduced Motherwell to the concept of “automatic” drawings. The Surrealists often deployed the process of automatism, or abstract “automatic” doodling to tap into their unconscious. This concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell. Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism. In the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of Abstract Expressionism ,or the New York School. Throughout the 1950s Motherwell also taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. At this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, and in addition to directing the influential Documents of Modern Art Series. In 1965 Motherwell worked on another prominent series called the The "Lyric Suite", named after Alban Berg’s string quartet. In 1967, Motherwell began to work on his Open series. Inspired by a chance juxtaposition of a large and small canvas.
In 1977, Motherwell was given a major mural commission for the new wing of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Robert Motherwell died in Provincetown, Massachusetts on July 16, 1991.
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