Artist Info
Robert Motherwell
American, b. 1915 - 1991.
From Grove Art online: American painter, printmaker and editor. A major figure of the Abstract Expressionist generation. From 1932 he studied literature, psychology and philosophy at Stanford University, CA, and developed a love for the broad spaces and brights colors that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract paintings. In 1937-8, enrolled as a postgraduate student of philosophy at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Motherwell decided to become an artist after seeing modern French painting during a trip to Paris in 1938-9, but in order to satisfy his father's demands for a secure career he first studied art history from 1940 to 1941 under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, NY. Through Schapiro he met Roberto Matta and other exiled European arsists associated with Surrealmism; their use of automatism as a means of registering subconcious impulses was to have a lasting effect on Motherwell. During the 1940s, he remained devoted to reconizable imagery, and a subject matter of literary and of a political nature. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he spent much of his time lecturing and teaching: he taught at Black Mountatin College, NC, in 1950, and from 1951 to 1959 at Hunter College, New York. See file for full ciatation.
