Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Spanish Elegy”, Lithograph, size , 25 3/8 x 21 3/8 inches, printed in black on Chine Appliqué and red Japanese Gampi paper mounted on white Arches Wove Paper

Robert Motherwell was a major figure of the Abstract Expressionist generation. His work encompassing the automatism of the Surrealists, the expressive brushworks of action painting, and the saturated hues of field painting.

At the age of eleven, Robert Motherwell was awarded a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and went on to the California School of Fine Arts in 1932. He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1936. Beginning his career as a painter in 1939 in Paris, he had his first solo exhibition of his work. Motherwell returned to the United States and studied art history at the Columbia University from 1940 to 1941.

It was there that Matherwell met Roberto Matta, Meyer Schapiro, and other exiled European artists associated with Surrealism. Emotionally charged brushwork and severely structured abstract were painted during this period, but in 1943, Motherwell produced a series of dark, menacing works in response to World War II.

The work for which he is best known, the series “Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV” (1953-1954), are large abstracts that reflect his generation’s despair at the lost cause of the Spanish Civil War. During the 1950s, Motherwell spent most of his time lecturing and teaching, notably at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was during this time he worked on his most influential literary achievement, “The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology” published in New York in 1951.

In 1952, Robert Motherwell and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt produced the journal “Modern Artists in America.” Motherwell was married to Helen Frankenthaler, also an abstract artist, from 1958 to 1971. During the years 1968 to 1972, Mortherwell worked on a series of paintings called “Open,” which reflected the new style of color field painting. His later works returned to the more traditional Abstract Expressionist style.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Wall Painting III”, 1952, Oil on Fiberboard, 48 x 72 Inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Robert Motherwell was an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

He described his working process as follows: “I begin painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors, which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images.”

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Elergy to the Spanish Republic No. 110”, Acrylic with Pencil and Charcoal on Canvas, 1971, Guggenheim Museum

The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War which started when he was twenty-one made an indelible impression on Robert Motherwell. who later devoted a series of more than two hundred paintings to the theme. From Motherwell’s retrospective view, the war became a metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his series “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as poetic, abstract symbols for the unceasing cycle of life and death.

Motherwell demonstrates his admiration for French Symbolism with this series of paintings, an appreciation he shared with his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters. Motherwell was particularly inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s belief that a poem should not represent some specific entity, idea, or event, but rather the emotive effect that it produces. The abstract motif common to most of the Energy series, an alternating pattern of bulbous shapes compressed between columnar forms, may be read as an indirect reference to the experience of loss and the heroics of stoic resistance.

The contentious nature of life itself is expressed through the stark juxtaposition of black against white, which is emphasized by contrasting ovoid and rectilinear slab forms. Concerning the Elergy series, Motherwell said, “After a period of painting them, I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.”