Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, is celebrated for his paintings, prints, and collages that brought together gestural abstraction with an exploration of the human psyche. Influenced by Henri Matisse, Motherwell aimed to free color and line from their descriptive functions, using them instead to convey deep emotions through simplicity. His body of work consistently engages in dialogues between European modernism and a fresh American sensibility, abstraction and figuration, and the interplay of formal structure and emotional depth.

After earning his degree from Stanford University in 1937, Motherwell pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard before briefly studying at Columbia University in 1940, where Meyer Schapiro encouraged him to focus on painting. A pivotal trip to Mexico in 1941 with Surrealist Roberto Matta led him to fully dedicate himself to art. His first solo exhibition took place in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, after which Motherwell emerged as a prominent advocate for avant-garde art in the United States. Throughout the 1950s, he lectured widely on abstraction while teaching at Hunter College in New York and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his students included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland, who were deeply influenced by his extensive knowledge of art, literature, and philosophy.

Motherwell’s work was the subject of major retrospectives across Europe in the 1970s, including exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh, and London. In 1983, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo organized a significant retrospective that traveled to several cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York. Another retrospective was held in 1991 in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Fort Worth.

Recently, in June 2023, Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, curated by Susan Davidson, opened at The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas, marking the first major U.S. exhibition in over 25 years to comprehensively explore his work, and it traveled to Kunstforum Vienna that October. Additionally, in November 2022, the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston presented Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself, the most extensive survey of his drawings to date.