Robert Motherwell

Biography

In early April 1965 Motherwell went into a Japanese shop for a toy for a friend’s child, saw rice paper there and bought a thousand sheets. He set himself a rule: to cover them all, in ink, without a single correction. By the end of May about six hundred were done when Kenneth Noland rang to say that the sculptor David Smith had crashed. Motherwell and his wife reached Vermont a quarter of an hour after his death. He never went back to the sheets; a year later he had them framed and said that he had half painted them and they had half painted themselves. That is how the “Lyric Suite” came about, named after Alban Berg’s quartet.

He was born on 24 January 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, the first child of Robert Burns Motherwell; the family soon moved to San Francisco, where his father became head of the Wells Fargo Bank, and spent the summers on the Washington coast. It was there that he met his first mentor, the painter Lance Wood Hart. His school years were spent in California, and the ultramarine of its sky and the ochre of its hills later passed into his abstractions. Between 1932 and 1937 he briefly studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts and took a degree in philosophy at Stanford, having read his fill of Mallarmé, Joyce and Poe. At twenty, with his father and sister, he travelled through Europe from Paris to Amalfi and ended the journey in the Scottish town of Motherwell. His father wanted a secure profession for his son, and after several months of domestic cold war, as he later recalled, they struck a bargain: the son would take a doctorate so that he could teach if need be, and the father would pay him fifty dollars a week for life, enough not to starve on but not enough to live in comfort either. So he found himself at Harvard, under Lovejoy and Prall, then for a year in Paris, where he studied the writings of Delacroix, and in 1940 in New York, at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro.

It was Schapiro who advised him to give up scholarship for painting.

It was he, too, who brought him together with the exiled Parisian Surrealists, Ernst, Duchamp, Masson, and arranged for him to study with Kurt Seligmann. In 1941 Motherwell sailed with Roberto Matta to Mexico; on the boat he met the actress Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, his first wife, and in Mexico he decided that painting would be his main occupation. Matta explained automatic drawing to him; Wolfgang Paalen, for whose sake he stayed on in Mexico for several months, changed his drawing and introduced him to Breton by letter. The Mexican sketches grew into his first serious paintings, “The Little Spanish Prison” (1941) and “Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive” (1943). On his return he decided that all the Americans lacked was a common creative principle, and at Matta’s request he and Baziotes went round to Pollock, de Kooning, Hofmann and others preaching automatism. In 1944 Peggy Guggenheim gave him his first one-man show at her gallery Art of This Century, and in the same year the Museum of Modern Art became the first museum to buy a work of his. He sat on the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine VVV, contributed to Paalen’s DYN, and from 1948, together with Baziotes, Newman, Hare and Rothko, ran the Subjects of the Artist school on Eighth Street: lectures by Arp, Cage and Reinhardt filled the room, there was no money, and in the spring of 1949 the school closed.

In 1948, for the second issue of the magazine Possibilities, which he was producing with Harold Rosenberg, Motherwell drew a sheet to go with Rosenberg’s poem “The Bird for Every Bird”: at the top three handwritten lines, at the bottom rough black ovals and rectangles on white. The issue never came out, and the sheet went into a drawer. A year later he took it out and began reworking it; so began the “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”, which he painted to the end of his life, more than two hundred canvases, and that first sheet he retrospectively named “Elegy No. 1”. In the 1950s he taught at Hunter College and at Black Mountain; among his students were Twombly, Rauschenberg and Noland. In 1951 the anthology he had compiled, “The Dada Painters and Poets”, came out. In 1954–1958 he painted a small series bearing the words Je t’aime, and cigarette packets and labels from the studio went into his collages, later a whole series with Gauloises packets in bright red acrylic. In 1958 he married Helen Frankenthaler and that same year, by his own account, began painting with a new energy. In the summer of 1962 in Provincetown he made the 64 canvases of “Beside the Sea”: paint flung at the canvas with full force, like a wave on the shore beneath the studio windows. In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art showed his retrospective, which travelled to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Essen and Turin. From 1967, and for almost twenty years, ran the “Open” series: a plane of a single colour, cut by a few lines into something like a rectangle.

In 1972 he married the photographer Renate Ponsold and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he set up separate studios for painting, collage and printmaking. In 1977 he received a commission for a mural for the new wing of the National Gallery in Washington, in 1983 a large retrospective at the Albright-Knox, in 1988 he made forty lithographs for Joyce’s “Ulysses”, and in 1989 he received the National Medal of Arts. In 1981 he had founded the Dedalus Foundation.

He died in Provincetown on 16 July 1991. On 20 July several hundred people gathered on the beach by his house; Stanley Kunitz read to them Motherwell’s favourite poem, Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”.