Robert Motherwell 1915-1991
"Motherwell’s synthesis of the social and the personal, the intellect and intuition, is something that I greatly admire—especially since I know that he was aware that the two are inseparable, and that both elements of this polarity necessarily impacted his understanding of the world and of himself." —Phong H. Bui, The Brooklyn Rail
Robert Motherwell, one of the great painters of Abstract Expressionism, is renowned for his work in painting, print and collage that combined a new visual language of gestural abstraction with the dialectical nature of the human psyche. Deeply informed by Henri Matisse, Motherwell strove to liberate color and line from its strict descriptive role and demonstrate its potential as a device by which profound emotions could be expressed through simple means. Throughout his oeuvre, Motherwell's work is defined by pervading dialogues between European modernist traditions and a distinctive and fresh American approach to art making; pure abstraction and figuration; as well as formal and emotional modus operandi.
Motherwell graduated from Stanford University in 1937 and later continued his graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. It was in 1940, when Motherwell studied briefly at Columbia University, that Meyer Schapiro encouraged him to pursue painting rather than scholarship. Following a 1941 voyage to Mexico with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Motherwell fully committed to painting as his primary vocation. In 1944, Motherwell was granted his first one-person show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. Soon after, he became the leading spokesperson for avant-garde art in America. Throughout the 1950s, Motherwell lectured widely on abstract painting and held a professorship at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina-during which he taught Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland, all of whom would become deeply influenced by Motherwell's rigorous academia and extensive knowledge of literature and philosophy.
During the 1970s, Motherwell was the subject of numerous significant retrospective exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh and London. In 1983, a major retrospective of Motherwell's work was mounted at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which subsequently traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Another retrospective was presented in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Fort Worth in 1991.
In November 2022, the Menil Collection opened the most comprehensive survey of the artist's drawings ever staged, Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself, at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas. The exhibition celebrates the publication of the catalogue raisonné of the artist's drawings, prepared by the Dedalus Foundation, New York.
In 2023, The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas, staged Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, organized by Susan Davidson. The first presentation in more than a quarter century to fully examine the mastery of the artist, the exhibition travelled to Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna through January 2024. In 2025, the New York Public Library staged Robert Motherwell: At Home & In The Studio, celebrating a gift from the Dedalus Foundation of prints by Robert Motherwell as well as books from the artist’s home donated by his family.