Robert Motherwell Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Motherwell was born in 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, and grew up largely on the West Coast of the United States. From an early age he showed a strong inclination toward literature and philosophy, interests that would remain central to his thinking as an artist. He studied at Stanford University, where he concentrated on philosophy, and pursued further graduate work that deepened his engagement with aesthetics and the history of ideas. Travel in Europe exposed him to the modernist tradition in painting and poetry. Upon returning to the United States he continued his studies in New York, where the art historian Meyer Schapiro introduced him to a circle of artists and intellectuals whose ideas decisively shaped his future course.

Surrealist Influence and the Move Toward Painting
Through Schapiro, Motherwell met exiled European Surrealists who had gathered in New York during and after the Second World War, among them Roberto Matta, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst. Their advocacy of automatism, chance, and the unconscious offered the philosophically trained Motherwell a procedure that was both rigorous and open-ended. Matta, in particular, encouraged him to translate automatic drawing into painting and collage. Motherwell took up collage with enthusiasm, fusing torn and cut papers with ink and paint, and he began to treat gesture as a form of thought. The Surrealists also modeled an artist-as-intellectual role that resonated with him: a painter who reads philosophy and poetry, writes essays, and debates ideas in public settings.

Abstract Expressionism and the New York School
By the mid-1940s Motherwell had become a central figure in the emergent New York School alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and Franz Kline. He took part in the intense discussions that animated artists clubs and studios in downtown Manhattan, arguing for a painting that could embody freedom, risk, and the pressures of contemporary history. Critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg engaged his work in the broader debate about modern American art, and Motherwell, unusually articulate among his peers, answered with essays and lectures that helped define the aims of Abstract Expressionism. Support from dealers and patrons, including Peggy Guggenheim, opened doors to exhibitions and placed him in front of a wider public as the new American painting gained international attention.

Major Series and Themes
Motherwell is best known for his long-running series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, initiated in the late 1940s. Composed of repeated black ovals and vertical bars often set against white or color grounds, the Elegies function as a memorial to the Spanish Civil War and as a meditation on death, resilience, and the tension between structure and gesture. The austere forms are never merely emblematic; their scale, interval, and brushwork vary from canvas to canvas, turning the series into a sustained exploration of pictorial rhythm and meaning.

In the late 1960s he began the Open series, in which a spare charcoal line describing an open rectangular shape hovers over large, luminous color fields. These paintings probe perception itself: how a simple linear frame can alter the scale, light, and spatial breath of color. Throughout his career he sustained a profound commitment to collage, adapting the Dada inheritance to his own purposes by integrating printed ephemera, book pages, and textured papers into compositions that balance accident with choice. His editorial work on The Dada Painters and Poets gave him a historical and literary framework for understanding collage as a modern language, and it reinforced his belief that painting and poetry share structural affinities.

Writing, Editing, and Teaching
Motherwell published essays and delivered lectures that argued for painting as a deeply humanist endeavor, rooted in the life of the mind as much as in technique. He edited anthologies that brought European avant-garde writings to American readers, most notably The Dada Painters and Poets, which became a standard reference for artists and scholars. As a teacher in New York, including at Hunter College, and as a visiting lecturer elsewhere, he mentored younger painters and helped connect the studio to broader intellectual currents. His exchanges with poet-curator Frank O Hara, as well as with historians and critics around the New York museums, further entwined his studio practice with critical discourse.

Collaborations, Friendships, and Personal Life
Motherwell s friendships and collaborations sustained his work over decades. Conversations with Rothko and Newman about the drama of scale and the expressive potential of color found different answers in his own practice, while exchanges with Baziotes and Gorky kept alive a sensitivity to lyricism and form. The example of Pollock pushed him to consider the relationship between chance and control, even as he pursued a more architectonic clarity. His marriage to painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1958 created a household steeped in discussion about painting and criticism; each artist maintained a distinct vocabulary, yet their dialogue about color, gesture, and the legacy of the New York School enriched both. Later, with photographer Renate Ponsold, he found a steadier domestic rhythm while maintaining a rigorous studio schedule. Summers in coastal New England, especially in Provincetown, offered the quiet necessary for sustained work and reflection.

Later Career, Prints, and Public Recognition
In later decades Motherwell expanded his engagement with printmaking, working closely with master printers to translate the fluidity of ink and brush into lithographs and etchings. The discipline of serial production echoed his painterly cycles and sharpened his sensitivity to edge, pressure, and interval. He exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, and major museums collected his paintings, collages, and prints. Retrospective exhibitions surveyed his contribution to twentieth-century art, tracing the arc from Surrealist automatism to the distilled structures of the Elegies and Opens. Even as artistic fashions shifted, he remained committed to the ethical and poetic stakes of abstraction, arguing that modern art is a way of thinking in forms.

Legacy and Death
Motherwell died in 1991 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He left behind an oeuvre that demonstrates how American painting could absorb European modernism and transform it into something new: philosophical without being academic, emotionally intense without theatrics. His work shaped generations of painters who learned from his example that abstraction can be both rigorous and deeply felt. The Elegies continue to serve as a touchstone for artists confronting history, while the Open paintings exemplify the quiet drama of line and color. As an editor, writer, teacher, and painter, he created a model of the artist as an engaged intellectual, and his influence persists wherever the New York School is studied, debated, and reimagined.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Wisdom - Hope - Art.

Other people realated to Robert: Lee Krasner (Artist), Harold Rosenberg (Writer), Helen Frankenthaler (Artist)