Birth Year : 1915
Death Year : 1991
Country : US
Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Wisconsin. He attended the Otis
Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1926 to 1927 and pursued his studies
at Stanford University, where he got his degree in 1936. At Harvard he
studied towards a degree in philosophy, but continued this work in France
during 1938 and 1939. During the Second World War he studied at Columbia
University in New York and came to know the expatriate Surrealists at work
there. He participated in a Surrealist exhibition in 1942. Over the next
decade his career was divided between developing strength as an artist
and as a critic. With Rothko< and Baziotes,
he founded an art school in 1948 called "The Subjects of the Artist," a
short-lived institution that was crucial in the development of lyrical
abstraction in American painting.
Motherwell's work occupies a place between the experimental painting
of the European Surrealist and Dada schools and the more vibrant work of
Abstract Expressionism in America. In 1953 he married the painter Helen
Frankenthaler, and in the following
year began his most famous series, "Elegies for the Spanish Republic."
After 1960 his work showed a greater economy of means; he abandoned expressionist
elements in favor of a cooler, more elegant style. His last works are large
color-field abstractions and silk-screen collages.
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Robert
Motherwell
Cambridge
Collage
Robert
Motherwell
Mallarme's
Swan
Robert
Motherwell
Je
t'aime, No. III with Loaf of Bread
Robert
Motherwell
Sans
Titre, 1982
Robert
Motherwell
Mexican
Night, 1979
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