Biography of robert motherwell

While in the 's ex-patriate Surrealists in New York took young Motherwell's work seriously, and while he was friends with the Chilean Surrealist Matta, he wasn't interested in the look of Surrealist art. He regarded these influences as inevitable. I grew up in a landscape not at all dissimilar to Provence, or to the central plateau of Spain, or to parts of Italy and the Mediterranean basin.

In drawing, Motherwell invented his own elegant calligraphy fluid diagrams of emotional states as well as testimony to a faultless sense of placement. Drawing was primary; color was but a means of carrying content. Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic: ochre for the earth, green for the grass, blue for the sky and sea. I guess that black and white, which I use most often, tend to be protagonists.

In his collages there is vivid evidence of his life-long love of things French, and of his delight in anything Mediterranean. They show clearly the basis of his art in French modernism, his enthusiasm for French poetry, food, even for the color of French cigarette wrappers Gauloise blue. For Motherwell, the collages "are a kind of private diary, not made with an actual autobiographical intention, but one that functions in an associative way for me.

Motherwell enjoyed a long and successful career of national and international exhibitions. He exhibited at the Kootz Gallery during the late 's, at the Sidney Janis Gallery through the 's and early 's, and at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in the late 's. In the 's his works were on exhibition in New York galleries, in several other American states, and in other countries.

Motherwell's best known images are probably the Spanish Elegies, the first of which appeared in Originally, he intended them as a tribute to the short-lived Spanish Republic, but they preoccupied him off and on until his death. He said the Elegies were "also general metaphors of the contract between life and biography of robert motherwell, and their interrelation.

Another series of paintings called the Opens came from seeing a small canvas in the studio leaning against a larger one; the series is "severely geometric. Motherwell's rich intellectual background consistently found expression outside the studio. In he co-edited the cultural magazine Possibilities. In he edited The Dada Painters and Poets, a major anthology of the early 20th-century movement, which helped to inspire the revival of Dada during the late 's and early 's.

Harvard University issued a second edition of this work in Between and he taught at Hunter College, and in the mids he served as art director for the Partisan Review. He was also a brilliant speaker and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the United States. In Motherwell began making limited editions of his work. He was the only one of the original abstract expressionists to take up printmaking.

He combined his unique abstract style with the materials and technical requirements of printmaking to create more than editions over the next 30 years. Robert Motherwell died in July, Motherwell, Robert gale. The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Robert Motherwell gale.

Biography of robert motherwell

Robert Motherwell American artist Robert Motherwell was one of the founders and last surviving members of the path-breaking Abstract Expressionist movement in painting. Motherwell, Robert oxford. Motherwell, Robert —91 US painter and writer. In he moved to New York and studied briefly at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship.

After a voyage to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Matta, Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. Beginning in the mids, Motherwell became the leading spokesperson for avant-garde art in America. He exhibited regularly at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery and in group shows at museums throughout the United States.

He lectured widely on abstract painting, and he founded and edited the Documents of Modern Art series. Inhe began to work with his celebrated Elegy to the Spanish Republic theme, which he continued to develop throughout his life. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake.

And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do. Thus, in the early s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of abstract expressionism or the New York School : "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism.

He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. And if we could come with something. Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle.

It sort of all began that way. In Motherwell began to exhibit his work in New York and in he had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of This Century" gallery; that same year the MoMA was the first museum to purchase one of his works. From the mids, Motherwell became the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America.

In Motherwell divorced Maria and in he married Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters. Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor to Wolfgang Paalen's journal DYNwhich was edited from to in six issues. In Motherwell executed the image which would prove to be the germ of the Elegies to the Spanish Republicone of his best known series of works.

During —48, Motherwell collaborated with the art critic Harold Rosenberg and others to produce Possibilitiesan art review. During the latter year Motherwell created an image incorporating Rosenberg's poem " The Bird for Every Bird ", meant for inclusion in the review's second issue. The top half was a handwritten, stylized rendering of the poem's final three lines, and the bottom half was a visual element consisting of roughly rendered black ovoid and rectangular forms against a white background.

He rediscovered it roughly one year later [ 21 ] and decided to rework its basic elements. This led to the Elegies to the Spanish Republic which Motherwell continued to produce for the rest of his life; several years later Motherwell retroactively titled the original image Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. A representative example is Elegy to the Spanish Republic No.

The series' abstract imagery has been interpreted as representing violence in Hispanic culture, not necessarily related to the Spanish Civil War of its title. For example, Motherwell himself and others have compared the images to the display of a dead bull's genitalia in the Spanish bullfighting ring. The school failed financially and closed in the spring of At this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, and in addition to directing the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, he edited The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthologywhich was published in From toduring the biography of robert motherwell of his second marriage, he worked on a small series of paintings which incorporated the words Je t'aimeexpressing his most intimate and private feelings.

His collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels, becoming records of his daily life. He was married for the third time, from toto fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. In he and Frankenthaler spent a three-month honeymoon in Spain and France, during which he began painting with a new energy that he attributed to her influence.

During the s, Motherwell exhibited widely in both America and Europe and in he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; this show subsequently traveled to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Essen, and Turin. The size and content suggest that Motherwell intended to create a monument to heroism in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica.

In Motherwell worked on another prominent series called the Lyric Suitenamed after Alban Berg 's biography of robert motherwell quartet. Motherwell recalled, "I went to a Japanese store to buy a toy for a friend's kid, and I saw this beautiful Japanese paper and I bought a thousand sheets. And I made up my mind, this was in the beginning of Aprilthat I would do the thousand sheets without correction.

I'd make an absolute rule for myself. And I got to in April and May, when one night my wife and I were having dinner and the telephone rang. And it was Kenneth Noland in Vermont saying that I should come immediately. And I said, 'what's happened? The couple drove hastily to Vermont, arriving 15 minutes after Smith had died. Motherwell stopped work on the series.

He said of them: "And then one year I had them all framed, and I like them very much now. I should also say that I half painted them and they half painted themselves. Motherwell became friends with many European surrealists in New York and was an active spokesman and writer in support of abstract art. Open Daily, a. Collection Highlights 20th Century.

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