American artist and writer, the dominant painter in Abstract Expressionism in the latter half of the twentieth century and one of its leading spokesmen. He is the author of “The Dedalus Sketches,” “Alphabet Series,” “Black Sounds,” The Cubist Painters” and “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell.”
Motherwell was the son of a bank president who moved with his family to California in the boy’s early childhood where Robert received a scholarship at age 11 to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. After attending the California School for Fine Arts in San Francisco, Robert earned a B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy at Stanford University. Spending several years abroad pursuing academics at Grenoble in France, he settled in New York City in 1940 and resumed his studies at Columbia University and decided to take up painting. Completely self-taught, he drew on the Dada, Cubist and surrealist movements for his earliest inspirations. While working as an art instructor at Hunter College he gained a wide following of students who praised his knowledge and ability, who said that “three sentences from him regarding a painting was worth a semester from any other teacher.”
Motherwell’s work evolved from small, satirical paintings to huge, sprawling canvases, where his interest in Freud and psychoanalysis led him to spontaneous paintings and works of collages and austere abstractions. One of his best known works, “Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” evolved over a 20 year period and sold for $880,000 in New York in auction in 1989. With collages renowned for disparate subjects such as Spanish prisons, children’s toys and vinegar bottles, his central recurring theme was romantic radicalism.
Refusing to be pigeonholed, Motherwell was unique for his ability to change with the times and still be relevant. Lining up his paintings side by side to compare them, he observed, “Often the canvas tells you something. It’s only by lining up a group of works to compare that I can see where I’m closer to my inner self and where I depart from it.”
Some of his most notable works are “Summer Open With Mediterranean Blue,” and “Open No. 11.”
Motherwell made four marriages, the third to artist Helen Frankenthaler from 1958-1971 and the fourth to Renate. The father of two daughters, he maintained a summer studio in Provincetown, MA where he died of a stroke on 7/16/1991.
Link to Wikipedia biography