Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic — with their stark, iconic compositions — are some of the most recognisable paintings of Abstract Expressionism. Eloquent and educated, Motherwell was a key spokesman of the movement. His art is defined by an interplay of simple shapes, bold colours, gestural exuberance and cool restraint. 

Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, but spent most of his childhood in dry central California to help with his severe asthma. The landscape would later inform the broad spaces and colours of his paintings. During the 1930s, Motherwell earned a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, and a PhD from Harvard. He developed a keen interest in Modernist literature, which would strongly influence his work. 

In 1940 Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University. He encountered exiled Parisian Surrealists including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and André Masson. In 1941 he travelled with the painter Roberto Matta to Mexico, where he finally settled on painting as his true vocation. Matta introduced him to the concept of automatism, which would remain Motherwell’s driving principle on his return to New York. 

Motherwell had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘Art of This Century’ gallery in 1944. The Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his works that same year. Equally prolific as a writer, lecturer and editor, Motherwell soon became a central figure of the avant-garde. 

A key theme in Motherwell’s work was how American art could find its own voice in departing from the influence of European modernism. Throughout the 1950s he taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His students included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. 

In 1948 Motherwell made a drawing to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg. The image birthed his long-running, powerful and enigmatic series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, held today in major museum collections worldwide. They have been interpreted as referring to the human tragedies of war and oppression, evoking ancient architecture, primal womb and phallus symbolism and the cycle of life and death. 

Motherwell’s later works include the wave-like Beside the Sea paintings begun in 1962 — inspired by the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he stayed with his third wife, Helen Frankenthaler — and the Open series, whose rectangular motif he explored in paintings, prints, collages and drawings. In 1970 he moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he built separate studio spaces: one for painting and others for collage and printmaking. 

Motherwell was given a major retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 and continued to exhibit across the world over the following decades, with further important exhibitions touring Düsseldorf, Paris, London and the United States. He died in Cape Cod in 1991.