Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology.Motherwell, Robert (1951). The Dada Painters and Poets; an anthology. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, OCLC 1906000 He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Trained in philosophy, Motherwell then became an artist regarded as among the most articulate spokesmen and the founders of the abstract expressionist painters. He was known for his series of abstract paintings and prints which touched on political, philosophical and literary themes, such as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic.
Early life and education Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington on January 24, 1915, the first child of Robert Burns Motherwell II and Margaret Hogan Motherwell. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank, but returned to Cohasset Beach, Washington, every summer during his youth. Another Aberdeen native with a home at Cohasset Beach was Lance Wood Hart, painter and art teacher, who became Motherwell's early mentor. 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 colours that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract paintings (ultramarine blue of the sky and yellow ochre of Californian hills). 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, especially Mallarmé, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz. This passion stayed with Motherwell for the rest of his life and became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings.
At the age of 20, Motherwell took a grand tour of Europe, accompanied by his father and sister. They began in Paris, then traveled to Amalfi, Italy. The next stops were Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and London. The group ended their tour in Motherwell, Scotland.
According to Motherwell, the reason he went to Harvard was that he wanted to be a painter, although 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."Oral history interview with Robert Motherwell, 1971 Nov. 24-1974 May 1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
At Harvard, Motherwell studied under Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and David Wite Prall. He spent a year in Paris to research the writings of Eugène Delacroix, where he met American composer Arthur Berger who advised him to continue his education at Columbia University, under Meyer Schapiro. In 1939, Lance Wood Hart, then a professor of drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, invited Motherwell to join him in Eugene, Ore., to assist in teaching his classes for a full semester.John E Impert, "Painters of the Northwest: Impressionism to Modernism, 1900-1930," 2018, 91.
The New York School and the Surrealists
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. Schapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (Max Ernst, Duchamp, Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with Kurt Seligmann. The time that Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be influential to his artistic process. After a 1941 voyage with Roberto Matta to Mexico—on a boat where he met Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, an actress and his future wife—Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as The Little Spanish Prison (1941) and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943).
Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of "automatic" drawing or automatism, which the Surrealists used to tap into their unconscious. The concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell, further augmented by his meeting with the artist Wolfgang Paalen. Motherwell's encounter with Paalen prompted him to prolong his stay in Mexico for several months, in order to collaborate with him.See also Martica Sawin: Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 258 Motherwell's noted Mexican Sketchbook visually reflects the resulting change: while the first drawings are influenced by Matta and Yves Tanguy, later drawings associated with Motherwell's time with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences and details distinguished from the earlier period. Paalen also introduced Motherwell to André Breton, via a letter.Andreas Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben des Surrealisten Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin (Parthas) 2015, p. 465f. Motherwell's seminal trip to Mexico has been described as a little-known but important factor in the history and aesthetics of abstract expressionism. In 1991, shortly before his death, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen's innovative role in the genesis of abstract expressionism.Robert Motherwell in an interview with Elisabeth T. Langhorne, who wrote to Andreas Neufert, the biographer of Paalen: "I hope that [my book] Jackson Pollock: Kunst als Sinnsuche helps to rectify the case of Paalen and, as Motherwell put it, the ›conspiracy of silence‹ as to his role in the formation of abstract expressionism.« Elisabeth T. Langhorne to Andreas Neufert, June 13th, 2013 cit. Andreas Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben des Surrealisten Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin (Parthas) 2015, p. 452, note 67.
Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism: "What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do."
Thus, 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): "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism. He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. It was then that Baziotes and I went to see Pollock and de Kooning and Hofmann and Kamrowski and Busa and several other people. And if we could come with something. Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle. It sort of all began that way."
In 1942 Motherwell began to exhibit his work in New York and in 1944 he had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of This Century" gallery; that same year the Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to purchase one of his works. From the mid-1940s, Motherwell became the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America. His circle came to include William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, with whom he eventually started the Subjects of the Artist School (1948–1949). In 1949 Motherwell divorced Maria and in 1950 he married Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters.
Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor to Wolfgang Paalen's journal DYN, which was edited from 1942 to 1944 in six issues. He also edited Paalen's collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first issue of Problems of Contemporary Art.Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Joan Banach, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 1942-44, University of California Press, May 10, 2007, p. 50,
In 1948 Motherwell executed the image which would prove to be the germ of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, one of his best known series of works. During 1947–48, Motherwell collaborated with the art critic Harold Rosenberg and others to produce Possibilities, an art review. During the latter year Motherwell created an image incorporating Rosenberg's poem "The Bird for Every Bird", meant for inclusion in the review's second issue. The top half was a handwritten, stylized rendering of the poem's final three lines, and the bottom half was a visual element consisting of roughly rendered black ovoid and rectangular forms against a white background. The stark image was meant to "illustrate" the violent imagery of the poem in an abstract, non-literal way; Motherwell therefore preferred the term "illumination". The second issue of Possibilities did not materialize, and Motherwell placed the image in storage. He rediscovered it roughly one year later and decided to rework its basic elements. This led to the Elegies to the Spanish Republic which Motherwell continued to produce for the rest of his life; several years later Motherwell retroactively titled the original image Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 1, recognizing it as the series' starting point. A representative example is Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 (1971) which employs the same visual motif of rough ovoid and rectangular forms. The series' abstract imagery has been interpreted as representing violence in Hispanic culture, not necessarily related to the Spanish Civil War of its title. For example, Motherwell himself and others have compared the images to the display of a dead bull's genitalia in the Spanish bullfighting ring.
In 1948, Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, David Hare, and Mark Rothko founded the Subjects of the Artist School at 35 East 8th Street. Well-attended lectures were open to the public with speakers such as Jean Arp, John Cage and Ad Reinhardt. The school failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949. Throughout the 1950s Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland studied under and were influenced by Motherwell. At this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, and in addition to directing the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, he edited The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, which was published in 1951.