Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell – Studies with Kurt Seligmann and Meyer Schapiro

Robert Motherwell was born on 24 January 1915 in Aberdeen in the US state of Washington. He first studied philosophy at Stanford and French literature at Harvard, and met Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian during a two-year sojourn in Paris. Back in the USA, Motherwell studied art history with Kurt Seligmann and Meyer Schapiro at the Columbia University in New York, but parallel to the theory studies, he became increasingly interested in the practical side of art. His final decision to follow art as a career first came, however, in 1941 following a trip through Mexico which he took with the Surrealist sculptor and painter Roberto Matta. There he also made the acquaintance of the Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, for whose art magazine DYN he worked for a while. During this time, the first drawings in Motherwell’s characteristic pictorial language were created, imprinted with an impulsive, spontaneous approach oriented at the automatism of the Surrealists.

Robert Motherwell: a convinced black painter

Although Robert Motherwell’s most famous work, the 200-painting series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed an extremely political subject, i.e., the Spanish Civil War, he insisted that his art was totally apolitical. He was concerned with the humanistic aspect in the Spanish Elegies, with the memory of the terrible deaths that had occurred and should not be forgotten. Whilst the dominant element was initially black drawing, in the 1960s he moved closer to the colour field painting of Morris Louis. The art critic generally sees an intellectual representative of Action Painting in Motherwell and thus a counterpart to eye-catching artists such as Jackson Pollock. In actual fact, the deep meaning of his paintings always stood at the forefront of his paintings; he avoided shrill effects wherever possible in order to give room to a subtle unfolding and not to smother the desired message with colour and form. 

Robert Motherwell was a painting philosopher

Robert Motherwell could not and would not forget his philosophical and literary roots and so developed a unique form of Abstract Expressionism which in the one hand was characterised by the irrepressible striving from freedom that was a distinguishing hallmark of the artistic movement of his time, but on the other was also reflected in an exceptionally cultivated approach to his themes. His pictures were metaphors, painted words which should speak to their viewers and did so when the necessary amount of time had been contributed. 

Robert Motherwell died on 16 July 1991 in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the age of 76 from a heart attack. His artistic legacy comprised over 1000 works which had mostly only been shown in the USA – only a few museums in Germany own one of Robert Motherwell’s abstract paintings. The artist was married twice – from 1958 to 1971 to the abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler, and from 1972 until his death to the German photographer Renate Ponsold.