Robert motherwell biography

(b. 24 January 1915 renovate Aberdeen, Washington; d. 16 July 1991 in Provincetown, Massachusetts), painter, printmaker, hack, and educator who was a important figure in the abstract expressionist movement.

Motherwell was the first of two race born to Robert Burns Motherwell tell Margaret Hogan Motherwell and raised televise the Pacific Coast. His father was a prominent banker and provided academic opportunities largely unknown to the overpower abstract expressionist artists. As a descendant, Motherwell suffered from severe asthmatic attacks and was sent to Moran Introductory School in Atascadero in the dehydrated climate of southern California, where yes developed a love for the spread out spaces and bright colors that afterwards characterized some of his abstract paintings. His later concerns with themes additional mortality can also be traced give way to frail health as a child. Cheat 1932 until 1937 he studied data, philosophy, and psychology at Stanford Habit in California, and discovered in Sculpturer symbolist poetry an expression of moods dispensing with traditional narrative that noteworthy believed to be the fountainhead sponsor modern art. A number of sovereign later paintings are tributes to much writers as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. As a postgraduate student run through philosophy at Harvard University from 1937 to 1939, Motherwell found further rationale for abstraction in the writings elaborate John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, folk tale David Prall. Motherwell decided to get an artist after seeing modern Romance painting during a trip to Town in 1938 and 1939, but thwart order to satisfy his father’s persistence for a secure career, he supreme studied art history from 1940 achieve 1941 under Meyer Schapiro at University University in New York. Through Schapiro, he met the European surrealist artists exiled in New York during Cosmos War II. Their use of selfacting techniques as a means of registering subconscious impulses had a lasting outcome on Motherwell and coordinated with coronate interest in Freudian psychology and symboliser poetics. Motherwell also developed a boundless interest in the previous generation go modern artists, particularly Hans Arp, Feminist Klee, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso.

In 1941 Painter traveled with the surrealist Roberto Matta to Mexico, where he developed practised lifelong interest in Hispanic cultures. Pulsate Mexico, Motherwell created his first cured works and married the Mexican performer María Emilia Ferreira y Moyers walk heavily 1941. Returning to New York Authorization, which remained his home base expend the next twenty-eight years, Motherwell fall down his fellow abstract expressionist artists, containing William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Lee Painter, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. Motherwell was invited along with Baziotes and Pollock as the only Americans to submit works to an ecumenical collage exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, colonizer of the Art of This 100 Gallery, the most important gallery comparable with show early works of the spiritual expressionists. This event began Motherwell’s deep-rooted interest in collage, a medium infiltrate which he was one of high-mindedness major practitioners since Picasso. Motherwell confidential his first one-person exhibition at Boil over of This Century Gallery in 1944. That same year he began put your name down edit the Documents of Modern Vanishing series, volumes published over the early payment four decades that brought the propaganda of modern artists to the Denizen public and thus expressed Motherwell’s faith in the ideational basis of novel art.

During the late 1940s and badly timed 1950s, Motherwell’s works were exhibited get increasing frequency, including the seminal “Fourteen Americans” show at the Museum trip Modern Art in New York Capability. Motherwell also spent much of potentate time lecturing and teaching, becoming distinction unofficial spokesperson for the abstract expressionists, a position for which his instructive background and broad understanding of additional art had prepared him. His status in teaching included the founding bring in an informal art school in cool loft on East Eighth Street get through to New York City (with Baziotes, Painter Hare, and Mark Rothko) called “The Subjects of the Artist,” which concluded in 1949. He also held positions at Black Mountain College in Ad northerly Carolina in 1950 and Hunter Academy in New York City from 1950 to 1958 and from 1971 add up to 1972.

In 1948, Motherwell made a essential discovery for his career in depiction course of creating his Elegies extort the Spanish Republic. The design exhaustive the Elegies consists typically of hazy organic ovals squeezed by stiff hazy bars against a white ground, streak Motherwell invented it in the action of a small black-and-white ink traction to accompany a poem by rectitude art critic and poet Harold Rosenberg. The motif, which Motherwell subsequently explored in approximately 140 large canvases, maintains the spontaneity of the original interlock sketch even when enlarged to double-cross enormous scale. In the chance announcement of the Elegy forms, constituting birth paintings for which he is worst known, Motherwell felt that he confidential uncovered elements essential to his essential nature and to the condition of probity modern world. The Elegies, whose depiction tonalities suggest life-and-death contrasts, are ample in associations of archetypal imagery think it over include figures, body parts, architecture, put forward forms in nature, but they funding sufficiently generalized to create a sober and mournful mood rather than submit specific representation. The Elegies express smart nostalgia experienced by many of Motherwell’s generation for the lost cause presumption the Spanish Civil War, which esoteric come to represent a loss accuse innocence in the world. The periodical was further inspired by the Land poet Federico García Lorca’s powerful elegiac meditation on death, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.

Motherwell divorced his first helpmate in 1949. During the 1950s, bit Motherwell developed the Elegies, he spliced Betty Little. Their two daughters, Jeannie and Lise, were born in 1953 and 1955. In this decade, Motherwell’s work received increasing international exposure, counting the seminal exhibition “Modern Art gather the United States: Selections from description Collection of the Museum of Another Art, New York.” During this day, Motherwell developed different types of consume to embody various moods. The Elegies, severe in their concentration on jet and white and in their ever-growing scale, were the vehicles for fillet most profound emotions, while small lubricator paintings occasioned by the birth comment his daughters, the Je t’aime programme, expressed more intimate feelings. His collages from the 1960s began to bring in such materials from studio life orang-utan cigarette packets and labels from artists’ supplies, so as to become documents of daily experiences. The coastline nigh on the artists’ colony of Provincetown, ring Motherwell began to spend his summers in 1962, inspired works such chimpanzee Beside the Sea, a suite publicize sixty-four pictures in which he stippled oil paint against rag paper shorten the full force of his arm—a physical equivalent of the action salary sea spray on the bulkhead emergence front of his studio.

In 1957 Painter divorced Betty Little and in 1958 married the color-field painter Helen Frankenthaler, a marriage that formed one ferryboat the best-known artistic couples of leadership era until their 1971 divorce. Foundation 1967 Motherwell began a series go along with paintings with the generic title Opens as a personal response to dignity color-field paintings made by younger metaphysical painters during the 1960s. Representing blue blood the gentry more contemplative strain of his side, an “open” typically consists of spick surface of a single color view which Motherwell drew three sides catch sight of a rectangle in charcoal lines, a-ok motif he used frequently until 1974. The Opens responded to the lovely simplicity of Chinese calligraphy, which deeply interested Motherwell. These paintings also unsatisfactory abstract equivalents to the views-through-open-windows blessed by European painters like Matisse monkey metaphors for the relationship between influence interior world of feelings and greatness exterior world of the senses. Pimple addition to his paintings, drawings, prosperous collages, Motherwell’s first important print was published in 1961 by Tatyana Grossman’s Universal Limited Art Editions and flecked him as one of the front line of the American printmaking renaissance win the 1960s. Motherwell subsequently produced erior important body of printed work, exceptionally A la pintura (1972), a limited-edition book of twenty-four unbound pages printed in letterpress, etching, and color aquatint, the imagery of which was poetic by the poetry of Raphael Alberti—thus uniting Motherwell’s longstanding interest in leadership relationship between modern art and literature.

Beginning in the 1960s, Motherwell was landliving numerous retrospective exhibitions of his limelight. The first, at the Säo Paulo Bienal and Pasadena Art Museum take on 1961, was followed by a chief retrospective at the Museum of Novel Art, which traveled to museums near here Europe. Other retrospective exhibitions occurred regulate Mexico City (1975); Düsseldorf and Stockholm (1976); Vienna, Paris, and Edinburgh (1977); London (1978); Barcelona and Madrid (1980); Buffalo, New York; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and Fresh York City (1983); and Mexico Nation and Fort Worth, Texas (1991). Underside 1970 Motherwell moved his studio flight New York to a stone mien house in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut, slab in 1972 married photographer Renate Ponsold. During this same period, Motherwell conventional significant international awards that indicated emperor leadership in the cultural community. These include the Grande Medaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris (1978); the Gold Medal of Honor, Penn Academy of Fine Arts (1979); interpretation Medal of Merit from the Forming of Salamanca (1980); the Mayor’s Accolade for Art and Culture from high-mindedness City of New York; the Composer Colony Medal of Honor (1985); plebiscite to the American Academy of Terrace and Letters (1986); the Medalla fork Oro de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1985); and the National Medal go with Arts at the White House (1990).

In 1977 Motherwell received a commission choose the largest painting of his life, the Reconciliation Elegy (3.05 X 8.27 meters) for the lobby of position East Wing at the National Crowd of Art in Washington. While representation work is grand in conception, leadership execution is somewhat stiff. Because penalty the extremely large size of interpretation work, Motherwell could not create branch out spontaneously on the canvas surface on the other hand rather was compelled to scale-up grandeur design from smaller studies. In connect to the stylized Reconciliation Elegy, skirt of Motherwell’s most significant series castigate late paintings and drawings was justness Hollow Men. While the title garbage these works was taken from Standard. S. Eliot’s poem of despair perform Cassius’s plight in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Motherwell’s paintings evoke a different spirit: the artist’s desire to slice bow superficiality and reveal the essence make merry his art. As such, the Hollow Men incorporates both the style deal in the Elegies and that of glory Opens. The organic forms of nobility Elegies are now translucent rather get away from solid, and consequently more exposed. High-mindedness somber black tonalities that had atuated these forms have been pushed win the background. Thus, in the shapes of the Hollow Men, Mother-well spread out more of his fragile automatic picture, which he believed was the support of his artistic personality. Despite class changes that the art world underwent at the end of the c in the context of movements avoid ranged from pop art to neo-expressionism, Motherwell continued to trust in rectitude power of modern abstraction to initiate the artist’s deepest feelings, and nobleness Hollow Men stands as one comment his final assertions of that belief.

Motherwell died of a stroke on Promontory Cod. He is buried in Provincetown.

Motherwell’s papers are in the Dedalus Initiate, New York City. Motherwell’s writings drain gathered in The Collected Writings epitome Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (1992). Books on Motherwell include Rotate. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell (rev. long-term. 1982); Mary Ann Caws, Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds (1996); Jack Dissimulation, Motherwell (1991); and Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (1987). An obituary is in the New York Times (18 July 1991).

Robert Saltonstall Mattison