Robert Motherwell

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 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. 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. From 1954 to 1958, during the break-up of his second marriage, he worked on a small series of paintings which incorporated the words Je t'aime, expressing his most intimate and private feelings. His collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels, becoming records of his daily life. He was married for a third time, from 1958 to 1971, to fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. Because Frankenthaler and Motherwell were both born into wealth and known to host lavish parties, the pair were known as "the golden couple".

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.

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.