Robert motherwell signature

Artist

born Aberdeen, WA 1915-died Provincetown, MA 1991

Biography

Painter, printer, collage maker and author. A leading Abstract Expressionist, in 1949 he began his most famous series, Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which is comprised of more than 100 oil paintings and numerous sketches and drawings. He was editor of the important book series Documents of Modern Art.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Artist Biography

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915. He studied philosophy at Stanford University, California, and received his BA in 1937. Later that year he studied painting briefly at t

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Robert Motherwell American, 1915-1991

American painter, Robert Motherwell was one of the founders and principle exponents of Abstract Expressionism, who was among the first American artists to cultivate accidental elements in his work. A precocious youth, Motherwell received a scholarship to study art when he was 11 years old.  He preferred academic studies, however, and eventually took degrees in aesthetics from Stanford and Harvard universities.

Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only in 1941.  Although he was especially influenced by the Surrealist* artists; Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson; he remained largely self-taught.  His early work followed no single style, but already contained motifs from which much of his later art grew.  He received his first one-man show in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery* in New York City.  In the mid-1940s, Motherwell painted abstract figurative works that showed the influence of Surrealism*.  But in 1949 he painted the first in a series of works collectively

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Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell
Born	(1915-01-24)January 24, 1915 Aberdeen, Washington, U.S.
Died	July 16, 1991(1991-07-16) (aged 76) Provincetown, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Stanford University, Harvard, Columbia University
Known for	Painting, Printmaking
Movement	Abstract expressionism

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an Americanartist. He was an important painter in the abstract expressionist movement.

Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915. When he was 11 years old, he was given money to study art. In 1932 he studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. After getting a B. A. from Stanford University in 1937, he began to study philosophy at Harvard University. He studied in Europe for a year. He had his first art show in Paris in 1939.^[1]

Back in New York, he was friends with artists William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock.^[1] He was married to the painter Helen Frankenthaler from