— Born in Aberdeen, grew up in San Francisco, studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles 1926-1929, California School of Fine Arts, SF, graduate of Stanford University, attended Harvard and Columbia; taught at Hunter College in New York City 1951-1959. Married Helen Frankenthaler 1958.
— In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline — who set out to change the face of US painting. These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. Their interest was in exploring the deeper sense of reality beyond the recognizable image. Influenced by the Surrealists, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to New York, the Abstract Expressionists sought to create essential images that revealed emotional truth and authenticity of feeling.
Robert Motherwell was the youngest and most prolific of the group. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell first hoped to be a philosopher. His studies at Stanford and Harvard brought him into contact with the great American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who first challenged him with the notion of abstraction. What he took from Whitehead was the sense that abstraction was the process of peeling away the inessential and presenting the necessary. After moving to New York and becoming acquainted with a number of artists, Motherwell recognized in them similar desires.
Living in Greenwich Village, he became part of an exciting group of young artists. Forming a community and living on what little they had, the Abstract Expressionists made daring experiments in painting and in the intellectual investigations surrounding it. Their break with the traditional art conventions often provoked the harshest criticism from the establishment. Despite this, these early years were an incredibly productive period for Motherwell—seeing him experiment in a range of media, from painting to collage. His work often expressed the actions of the artist through dramatic and bright brush strokes. Valued for their energetic imagery, they attempted a pure emotional response made real in paint. His collage also concerned itself with an awareness of the presence of the artist in a work. Using torn paper on minimalist backgrounds, he created work that was at once discordant and lyrical.
Beyond his individual efforts as an artist, Motherwell played a major role in the intellectual and artistic development of the underground New York art world of the time. Reflecting on those early years, he spoke of their belief that "if the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting." It was this revolutionary sensibility that determined both his life and his art. This work, however, grew not simply from a desire to present a new US art form, but a need to express the major human themes in paint. Like the great masters, Motherwell’s importance can be seen in his attempts at expressing something monumental.
With the advent of Pop Art and its concentration on popular culture themes, the art public began to long for the idealism of the Abstract Expressionists. In relation to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Motherwell's large abstract paintings began to achieve a majesty in the public eye. Motherwell’s politics and spirituality were welcome reminders of a time when one could make art that did not engage the cynicism of a post-modern era. No longer the black sheep of the art world, Motherwell began to enjoy the fruits of years of dedicated work. It seemed, however, for many of the Abstract Expressionists that the newly found appreciation could not counteract the turbulence of those early years—many dying young or taking their own lives. Though somewhat alone, Motherwell committed himself to producing highly experimental work of emotional depth for the rest of his life. On July 16, 1991, at the age of 76 he died: the last of the great Abstract Expressionists. From the 1949 painting, At Five in the Afternoon, until the end of his life, Motherwell continued his search for a personal and political voice in abstraction. This search produced a body of work that remains a testament to the human soul and its persistence, and to the genre of abstract painting out of which it came.
— LINKS
— je t'aime No. 2 (1955) — Hermitage (1975) — Capriccio — Untitled (1974) — Untitled, fourth plate from the portfolio Ten Works x Ten Painters (1964, 56x41cm) — Untitled (1966) — Automatism A (1966)
— Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34 (1954, 203x254cm) _ Robert Motherwell was associated with a group of artists in the late 1940s and 1950s in New York who are now referred to as Abstract Expressionists. The term, although they did not like it, aptly describes their painting: abstract (usually to the point of being completely nonobjective), and an attempt to express feelings and moods through these abstract forms. Influenced both by current trends in modern European art (especially Surrealism, which focused on dreams and the unconscious), and the devastation of World War II, the Abstract Expressionists developed the first artistic movement that was completely American in origin. With Abstract Expressionism, the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. Representational art was no longer believed to be an adequate expression of the mood of the times. The Abstract Expressionists chose instead to use color, line, and texture for purely expressive purposes. Because of the extremely personal nature of the style, each artist’s work is distinct, based in part on their individual goals. Motherwell wanted to combine the conscious world (the world in which we live) with the unconscious; he thus linked many of his abstract forms to the conscious world through his titles. Motherwell painted more than one hundred works in the series "Elegy to the Spanish Republic." Each image in the series contains black, vertically oriented elements alternating with ovoid forms, and refers to the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, leaving fascist dictator Francisco Franco in power. Motherwell began the series in 1948, almost a decade after the war’s end, but recalled "I was twenty-one in 1936, and that was the most moving political event of the time." Motherwell’s studies in philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics (Stanford, 1932-36; Harvard, 1937-38; Columbia, 1940) are reflected in many aspects of the "Elegy" series. For example, the black-and-white contrasts that dominate the image could refer to night and day, death and life, and oppression and freedom. This last interpretation is underscored by the colors in the background, those of the flag of the Spanish Republic, which are being blotted out by the black forms in the foreground. Although Motherwell stated that the "Elegies" are not political, he did say that they were his "private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot." There is a tinge of nostalgia for a lost cause in these images, and the use of the term elegy emphasizes this sense of loss and death. An elegy is a short funeral song or lament—slow, meditative, and mournful. The rhythm of an elegy could be compared to the type of rhythm seen in the black forms moving slowly and solemnly across the canvas, marking the death of freedom for the Spanish people.
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Elegy
to the Spanish Republic # 57 (1960, 213x274cm)
[image >] _ The youngest member of the group of artists
who founded the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York in the 1940s,
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was also an active writer and editor of writings
on art, and was greatly influenced by poetry, philosophy (which he studied
at Stanford University) and, in the case of his Spanish Elegyseries, politics.
Though a relatively small part of Motherwell's total output, the Spanish
Elegies are the best known works of Motherwell's career and constitute
one of the most ballyhooed meditations of modern art on a political theme
since Picasso's
incomparably superior Guernica.
The origin of imagery for the Spanish Elegies is in Motherwell's 1948 black-and-white illustration for a poem by Harold Rosenberg (02 Feb 1906 – 1978) in the avant-garde periodical Possibilities. After many experiments in these abstract illuminations, the pattern emerged of black vertical and oval shapes against a white backdrop. These forms were reworked over the years until they were painted in monumental scale in the late 1950s, a time of prolific and brilliant activity in Motherwell's career. Motherwell's renewal of the Elegies and the general expansion of creative effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s came in a period when any self-doubts seem to have been resolved, and the artist was moving into a prolific and brilliant phase of his mature achievements. He suddenly seemed to have realized that he was in control of forms capable of almost infinitely monumental expression. This period of dynamic creative expression resulted in the large scale, rough-textured quality and architectural framework of a number of Spanish Elegy paintings, including No. 57. This painting in particular places the action of the painting within a unique spatial enclosure.
While the Elegies represent the central chapter in Motherwell's work, they stand out from other work in his oeuvre by the almost exclusive use of back and white, in contrast to the richer palette of his other paintings and collages. They are also distinctive in the artist's concentrated focus on a single theme—the destruction of Spanish democracy by Franco — in opposition to the range of experimentation and change that characterized most of Motherwell's career. No other single theme so preoccupied Motherwell as did the Spanish Elegies.
2001
