Robert Motherwell

Fine Artist

  • Born: January 24, 1915
  • Birthplace: Aberdeen, Washington
  • Died: July 16, 1991
  • Place of death: Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

American artist

Motherwell, a leading figure in the American abstract expressionist movement, was a prolific artist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and author. His printmaking, concepts, lectures, and writings influenced countless artists and brought attention to the work of little-known artists.

Areas of achievement Art, literature

Early Life

Robert Motherwell was the oldest of two children born to Margaret Hogan Motherwell and Robert Burns Motherwell, a prominent banker. The young Motherwell grew up along the Pacific coast of Washington and California. Because of his father’s career he received educational opportunities available to few other artists of the time.

His early childhood was marked by severe asthmatic attacks. To alleviate the asthma his parents sent him to the Moran Preparatory School in Atascadero, California. The dry climate of Southern California (the city is midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco) not only helped his condition but also introduced him to open spaces. Later in his life Motherwell would reflect on how his near-death struggles with asthma influenced his development of artistic metaphors for life and death.

Motherwell’s talent as an artist became apparent at an early age. He received a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles when he was only twelve years old. However, he did not study art full time. Instead, he studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at Stanford University from 1932 to 1937. He then went to Harvard University for graduate studies in philosophy.

During a brief move to Paris he became influenced by French artists and writers and decided to pursue art. However, because his father demanded a career with a secure future, he studied art history with Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University. Shapiro introduced Motherwell to European surrealist artists who were exiled in New York during World War II.

In the 1940’s, Motherwell began developing his own distinctive artistic style after being influenced by artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Piet Mondrian. Along with other artists in New York he founded the movement known as American abstract expressionism. His educational training helped him express in words the intellectual aspect of the artistic movement, and he thus became the movement’s unofficial spokesperson.

Life’s Work

Upon moving to New York and dedicating himself to painting, Motherwell began to express the surrealist theories of automatism in his art. The concept of automatism, which explored the unknown possibilities of the unconscious, offered him a principle for his art.

During Motherwell’s artistic career he produced several distinct series of paintings and experimented with printmaking and collages. He also held teaching positions, wrote and edited articles, and frequently lectured. His first and best-known series of paintings is the Elegies, also known as Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The first painting in this series appeared in the late 1940’s and originated from a drawing he produced to accompany a poem. Although originally intended to express his profound reaction to the Spanish Civil War, the series stretched across nearly 150 large canvases and several decades. The motif explored in this series consists of columnar verticals juxtaposed with organic ovoid shapes, primarily painted in black and white.

The Je t’aime series began after his two daughters were born in the 1950’s. These small paintings contrasted the large canvases produced in the Elegies series. They also gave him a vehicle to explore his most intimate feelings through the calligraphic handling of the paint. Beside the Sea, a series of sixty-four small-scale paintings, began in 1962 when he started spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. For this series he splashed oil paint on rag paper to reflect ocean spray against his studio wall.

From 1968 to 1972, Motherwell worked on the series known as the Opens, transforming the work into areas of sensuous color and often using three black lines to form an open rectangle in a suggestive manner of an open window or door. This concept had been inspired by observing a smaller canvas as it leaned on a larger canvas.

In 1961, Motherwell began experimenting with printmaking. He produced limited editions of his work, with the first published in the Universal Limited Art Editions collection. During the following thirty years he produced more than two hundred editions. This endeavor made him one of the leaders of the 1960’s American printing renaissance. Motherwell was the only one of the original abstract expressionists to move into the medium of printmaking.

The Hollow Men, a series of etchings from the 1980’s, incorporates styles from the Elegies and the Opens. The solid organic forms of the Elegies are now translucent and open with the black tones in the background. Motherwell’s drawing of the shapes is more apparent in these smaller more romantic versions. This series also established his continued commitment to the abstract movement while the art world had subsequently experienced the movements of pop art and neoexpressionism.

Motherwell worked also in collages throughout his career, having first experimented with collage in the early 1940’s. In these paintings he expressed his love for things French, often including wine labels and wrappers from objects such as French cigarette packs. He even added sheet music to his collages. In a way his collages are private diaries of his daily life, given that he used everyday things in his artwork.

Beyond taking part in several retrospective exhibitions, from 1960 and onward he received commissions, was invited to lecture across the United States, wrote and edited, and held teaching positions. He received several awards and medals, including the National Medal of Arts in 1990.

Motherwell taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Oberlin College, Brown University, and Hunter College. He coedited the magazine Possibilities from 1947 to 1948. A few years later he edited the book The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1951), a collection that inspired a revival of the Dada movement during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Motherwell edited numerous other books by and about artists. Motherwell cowrote Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds (1996) with scholar Mary Ann Caws. His articles were published in Design, New Republic, Partisan Review, and several other magazines and journals.

Married four times, Motherwell’s most celebrated union was with artist Helen Frankenthaler. During their marriage, from 1958 until their divorce in 1971, they were one of the best-known artist couples. Motherwell died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1991 at the age of seventy-six.

Significance

Motherwell was the youngest of the founders of American abstract expressionism. Though he was largely self-trained as an artist, he produced an extensive amount of work during a lengthy career that spanned more than five decades. He received many top honors, including awards and medals. His works of art are held in the collections of major museums worldwide.

Motherwell was unique in his ability as an artist to evolve but still remain true to the movement of abstract expressionism. Rather than develop a single trademark style, his art changed over time, nourished by new ideas. He also was unique in his ability to freely express the concepts of expressionism through writing. His frequent lectures and writings brought awareness and understanding to the movement. Indeed, his lucid writing style offers a window into the world of the expressionist artist, bridging the gap of understanding for those without a critical eye for art.

Bibliography

Arnason, H. H. Robert Motherwell. 1977. Reprint. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982. Comprehensive book on Motherwell’s work. Includes more than three hundred illustrations, a list of exhibitions, and a chronology.

Caws, Mary Ann. Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. Uses interviews with the artist to examine his modes of thinking and writing about his paintings. Also explores his attraction to French art and literature as well as his concern about the Spanish Civil War.

Caws, Mary Ann, and Robert Motherwell. Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Writing in a style that complements Motherwell’s abstraction, this volume combines a chronology of his life with photographs, transcripts of interviews with the artist, and numerous reproductions of his paintings and collages.

Mattison, Robert Saltonstall. Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Details Motherwell’s early work and his relationship to Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Also discusses specific paintings.

Rosand, David, ed. Robert Motherwell on Paper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. This volume was written to accompany an exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Color reproductions of more than one hundred of Motherwell’s works on paper.

Terenzio, Stephanie. ed. The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A collection of lectures, essays, and interviews by Motherwell from 1941 to 1988. His ability to articulate abstract expressionism in writing is evident in this work.

1941-1970: October 20, 1942: Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery Promotes New American Art.