Robert Mothé

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. 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. 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. 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 s

In 1958–59, Motherwell was included in "The New American Painting" exhibition, initiated by the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled across Europe. In 1958 he and Frankenthaler spent a three-month honeymoon in Spain and France, during which he began painting with a new energy that he attributed to her influence. The Two Figures series he made that year shows "the brightening power of Helen's colors" on his work. During the 1960s, Motherwell exhibited widely in both America and Europe and in 1965 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; this show subsequently traveled to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Essen, and Turin. In 1962, Motherwell and Frankenthaler spent the summer at the artists' colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the coastline inspired the Beside the Sea series of 64 paintings, the oil paint splashed with full force imitating the sea crashing on the shore in front of his studio. The 1963 untitled oil on canvas painting in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art exemplifies this stage in the artist's career. In 1964, Motherwell created a mural-sized painting entitled Dublin 1916, with Black and Tan, which is in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, N.Y. The size and content suggest that Motherwell intended to create a monument to heroism in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica. In 1965 Motherwell worked on another prominent series called the Lyric Suite, named after Alban Berg's string quartet. Motherwell recalled, "I went to a Japanese store to buy a toy for a friend's kid, and I saw this beautiful Japanese paper and I bought a thousand sheets. And I made up my mind, this was in the beginning of April 1965, that I would do the thousand sheets without correction. I'd make an absolute rule for myself. And I got to 600 in April and May, when one night my wife and I were having dinner and the telephone rang. And it was Kenneth Noland in Vermont saying that I should come immediately. And I said, 'what's happened?' And he said, 'David Smith's been in an accident'." Smith, the sculptor, was Motherwell and Frankenthaler's friend. The couple drove hastily to Vermont, arriving 15 minutes after Smith had died. Motherwell stopped work on the series. He said of them: "And then one year I had them all framed, and I like them very much now. I should also say that I half painted them and they half painted themselves. I'd never used rice paper before except occasionally as an element in a collage. And most of these were made with very small, I mean very thin lines. And then I would look at amazement on the floor after I'd finished. It would spread like spots of oil and fill all kinds of strange dimensions."

In 1967 Motherwell began to work on his Open series. Inspired by a chance juxtaposition of a large and small canvas, the Open paintings occupied Motherwell for nearly two decades. The Opens consist of limited planes of colour, broken up by minimally rendered lines in loosely rectangular configurations. As the series progressed, the works became more complex and more painterly, as Motherwell worked through the possible permutations of such reduced means. The late 1960s saw Motherwell using Gauloises packets and cartons in many collages, including an extensive series with the packets surrounded by bright red acrylic paint, often with incised lines in the painted areas. In 1972 Motherwell married the artist-photographer Renate Ponsold and moved to Gr

Motherwell died in Provincetown, Massachusetts on July 16, 1991. On his death, Clement Greenberg, champion of the New York School, left in little doubt his esteem for the artist, commenting that "although he is underrated today, in my opinion he was one of the very best of the abstract expressionist painters". The Dedalus Foundation was set up by Robert Motherwell in 1981 to foster public understanding of modern art and modernism through its support of research, education, publications, and exhibitions. When Motherwell died, he left an estate then estimated at more than $25 million and more than 1,000 works of art, not including prints. His will was filed for probate in Greenwich and named as executors his widow, Renate Ponsold Motherwell, and longtime friend Richard Rubin, a professor of political science at Swarthmore College. On July 20, 1991, several hundred people attended a memorial service for Motherwell on the beach outside his Provincetown home. Among them were the writer Norman Mailer and the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, both Provincetown summer residents. Speakers included the poet Stanley Kunitz, who read a poem that was a favorite of Motherwell's, William Butler Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium. Others in attendance included family members, friends, other artists, and Senator Howard Metzenbaum, an acquaintance of Motherwell's.

Several major exhibitions of Motherwell's work have been held.

Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, New York (1944). Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont (1957) Galerie Heinz Berggruen, Paris, France (1961) Pasadena Art Museum, California (1962) Smith College Museum of Art (1963) The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1965) The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (1972–73, traveled) David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1973) Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey (1973) Museo de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, Mexico (1975) Stadtisches Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany (1976) Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, France (1977) Royal Academy of Art, London, England (1978) The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs (1979) Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain (1980) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1983, traveled) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1985) Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (1991–92, traveled) Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (1996–97, traveled) Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2004–05) Robert Motherwell. Three Poems by Octavio Paz, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca Spain (2008-09) Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2011) Motherwell and the Poets (Octavio Paz and Rafael Alberti), Fundación Juan March Madrid (2012) Robert Motherwell: Lyric Suite, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015) Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas (2023)

Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, R. Motherwell, New York, 1951. Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press, 1999. Robert Motherwell translated to English Paul Signac's book, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, 1938. Arnason, H.H. Robert Motherwell. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977; revised edition 1982. Motherwell, Robert, Engberg, Siri and Joan Banach. Robert Motherwell: The Complete Prints 1940–1991. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003. Flam, Jack. Motherwell. London: Phaidon, 1991 Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 238-241 Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 11; p. 16; p. 27; p. 38; p. 258-261 Robert Hobbs. "Robert Motherwell Retrospective." Düsseldorf: Städische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1976. Robert Hobbs, Matthew Collings, Mel Gooding and Robert Motherwell. "Open." London: 21 Publishing Ltd., 2009 Archived 2011-10-09 at the Wayback Machine. Kingsley, April. The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Pleynet, Marcelin. Robert Motherwell. Paris: Daniel Papierski, 1989.