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Robert
Motherwell/Works
and biography
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Personage
(Autoportrait)
December 9, 1943 |
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Robert Motherwell was born January 4, 1915, in Aberdeen,
Washington. He was awarded a fellowship to the Otis
Art Institute in Los Angeles at age 11, and in 1932
studied painting briefly at the California School of
Fine Arts in San Francisco. Motherwell received a B.A.
from Stanford University in 1937 and enrolled for graduate
work later that year in the Department of Philosophy
at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
traveled to Europe in 1938 for a year of study abroad.
His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan
Gallery in Paris in 1939.
In September of 1940, Motherwell settled in New York,
where he entered Columbia University to study art history
with Meyer Schapiro, who encouraged him to become a
painter. In 1941, he traveled to Mexico with Roberto
Matta for six months. After returning to New York, his
circle came to include William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning,
Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock. In 1942, he was included
in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the
Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York. In 1944, Motherwell
became editor of the Documents of Modern Art series
of books, and he contributed frequently to the literature
on Modern art from that time.
A solo exhibition of Motherwell’s work was held
at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery,
New York, in 1944. In 1946, he began to associate with
Herbert Ferber, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and
spent his first summer in East Hampton, Long Island.
This year, Motherwell was given solo exhibitions at
the Arts Club of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum
of Art, and he participated in Fourteen Americans at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist subsequently
taught and lectured throughout the United States, and
exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad.
A Motherwell exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna,
and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville
de Paris in 1976–77. He was given important solo
exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1978. A retrospective
of his works organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York, traveled in the United States from
1983 to 1985. He died July 16, 1991, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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