ROBERT MOTHERWELL PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
ROBERT MOTHERWELL
American, 1915 – 1991
BIOGRAPHY
Robert Burns Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Canada to a mother of Irish origin and to a father of Scottish origin. His family moved to California when he was three years old. Motherwell “won a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, from 1926 to 1927 he later studied philosophy at Stanford University, graduating in 1936. At the same time he was preparing a thesis on Delacroix’s Journal. Between 1937 and 1938 he studied philosophy at Harvard and he continued these studies at Grenoble during a stay in France from 1938 to 1939, when he translated Paul Signac's D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme (From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism), and finally, during World War II, in the Archaeology and Fine Arts Department of Columbia University, New York. In New York he was able to meet the Surrealists and the European artists who had sought refuge there. He wrote for VVV, the review that André Breton published in New York and, with Pollock, Baziotes and Lee Krasner, began to write automatist poems. He also travelled to British Columbia and England, and spent a long time with Matta in Mexico. His extensive studies, even in the domain of art, were primarily intellectual, so he had almost to train himself in painting; he later learned engraving at Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York. As one of the intellectuals of the New York School, from 1944 he directed with Harold Rosenberg Documents of Modern Art, and in 1952 the first number of Modern Artists in America. In 1948 he founded with Rothko and Baziotes an art school called The Subjects of the Artist, from which arose the famous ‘club’ that was one of the points of departure of the New York School, very different in approach from the Surrealists and totally oriented towards exploiting the resources of Lyrical Abstraction. In 1951 he was appointed a professor at Hunter College, New York. He married the painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1953; his second marriage was to Renata Ponsold.
“At the start of his career Surrealism represented the extreme exploration of the possibility of freedom of the human spirit and its creative faculties, especially through automatic writing, which played an important role in the renewal of the American School between the wars. However, in Motherwell's own works Surrealism was only a methodological influence, with no visible specific Surrealist characteristics, as we can see from the works of 1949 such as The Voyage and Grenade, which already shows signs of Lyrical Abstraction; as had his Pancho Villa Dead and Living of 1943, of which the formal invention and title are no doubt automatic, but the presentation purely plastic. In 1964 he said, “I have never been a Surrealist painter, because I have never accepted the meaning Surrealism gives to the image”. Until 1950 his works show the tension in him between two urges that he tried to reconcile: on the one hand, the automatism of creative impulse, which he took, at least in his methodology, from the surrealists and Kurt Schwitters in particular, and which played an important role in this period of the New York School; and on the other, his cultural preference for the work of Matisse, whom he always considered the most important painter of the 20th century. This is the source of the large graphic ideograms, wide streaks of black dictated from within that tend to end in elegant, full arabesques, and painted on backgrounds that recall the colored cut-outs of Matisse's last period. These two divergent sources, which come together in cutting and assembling, were certainly at the origin of Motherwell's constant concern with collage. In 1951 he had the opportunity to create a mural decoration for a synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey. In about 1954 his own style became fully assured in the long series of Elegies for the Spanish Republic, which consists of eighty pictures painted between 1949 and 1989. Apart from the rare occurrence of a yellow ochre, an ultramarine or a red, the palette is reduced to black on a white background of silhouetted totems, ovals, and lines that would be considered directly graphic, in the style of Kline or Soulages, if they were not related to the elegant arabesques of Matisse cut-outs….
“At the end of the 1960s he explored the motif of the opening (of a door or a window) that he discovered while looking in his studio at a small canvas placed against a larger one. He varied this 'found object' by drawing the contour of the smaller format above or below the canvas on a vast monochrome field. In addition to his paintings, he also made very many collages in which he included musical scores, Gauloises or Players labels and other elements of his personal life. He also Illustrated a number of books, including Marcelin Pleynet’s L'Amour Vénitien (1984) James Joyce's Ulysses (1988) and three poems by Octavio Paz (1987).”
[Benezit, Dictionary of Artists, Paris, 2006, vol. 9, pp. 1396-1397]
Museum Collections
Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Fort Worth Museum of Art, Fort Worth, TX
Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum, New York
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA
Kunstmuseum, Basel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT
Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
National Academy of Design, New York
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Princeton Museum of Art, Princeton, NJ
Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst, Munich
Tate Gallery, London
Whitney Museum of Art, New York
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
