39 Facts About Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology.

Robert Motherwell was one of the youngest of the New York School, which included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Robert Motherwell was known for his series of abstract paintings and prints which touched on political, philosophical and literary themes, such as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington on January 24,1915, the first child of Robert Burns Motherwell II and Margaret Hogan Motherwell.

The family later moved to San Francisco, where Robert Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank, but returned to Cohasset Beach, Washington, every summer during his youth.

Between 1932 and 1937, Robert Motherwell briefly studied painting at California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco and received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University.

At Stanford, Robert Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of symbolist and other literature, especially Mallarme, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz.

At the age of 20, Robert Motherwell took a grand tour of Europe, accompanied by his father and sister.

At Harvard, Robert Motherwell studied under Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and David Wite Prall.

Robert Motherwell spent a year in Paris to research the writings of Eugene Delacroix, where he met American composer Arthur Berger who advised him to continue his education at Columbia University, under Meyer Schapiro.

In 1939, Lance Wood Hart, then a professor of drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, invited Robert Motherwell to join him in Eugene, OR to assist in teaching his classes for a full semester.

In 1940, Robert 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.

The time that Robert Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be influential to his artistic process.

The sketches Robert Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as The Little Spanish Prison and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive.

The concept had a lasting effect on Robert Motherwell, further augmented by his meeting with the artist Wolfgang Paalen.

Robert 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 Robert Motherwell's time with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences and details distinguished from the earlier period.

In 1991, shortly before his death, Robert Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen's innovative role in the genesis of abstract expressionism.

Robert Motherwell asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement.

In 1942 Robert 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 MoMA was the first museum to purchase one of his works.

Robert Motherwell's circle came to include William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, with whom he eventually started the Subjects of the Artist School.

In 1949 Robert Motherwell divorced Maria and in 1950 he married Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters.

Robert Motherwell edited Paalen's collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first issue of Problems of Contemporary Art.

In 1948 Robert 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.

The stark image was meant to "illustrate" the violent imagery of the poem in an abstract, non-literal way; Robert Motherwell therefore preferred the term "illumination".

The second issue of Possibilities did not materialize, and Robert Motherwell placed the image in storage.

Robert Motherwell rediscovered it roughly one year later and decided to rework its basic elements.

Robert Motherwell's collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels, becoming records of his daily life.

Robert Motherwell was married for the third time, from 1958 to 1971, to fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler.

In 1964, Motherwell created a mural-sized painting entitled Dublin 1916, with Black and Tan, which is in the Governor Nelson A Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.

The size and content suggest that Robert Motherwell intended to create a monument to heroism in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica.

In 1965 Robert Motherwell worked on another prominent series called the Lyric Suite, named after Alban Berg's string quartet.

In 1967 Robert Motherwell began to work on his Open series.

The late 1960s saw Robert Motherwell using Gauloises packets and cartons in many collages, including an extensive series with the packets surrounded by bright red acrylic paint, often with incised lines in the painted areas.

In 1972 Robert Motherwell married the artist-photographer Renate Ponsold and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where they lived in a carriage house with a hayloft aerie, a barn and a guest cottage adjoining a large studio.

Robert Motherwell had begun living there full-time beginning in the fall of 1971 after his divorce with Helen Frankenthaler was finalized.

In 1977, Robert Motherwell was given a major mural commission for the new wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1988, Robert Motherwell worked with the publisher Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press on a limited edition of the modernist novel Ulysses, by James Joyce.

When Robert Motherwell died, he left an estate then estimated at more than $25 million and more than 1,000 works of art, not including prints.

Robert Motherwell's 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.