Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), American painter, one of the founders of abstract expressionism and one of its most prolific and articulate exponents. Robert Burns Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He abandoned his literary and psychological studies for painting in 1941, working entirely in abstraction. His first solo exhibition was in 1944 at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York City. Since then Motherwell has exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe. He represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in Italy in 1950 and at the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil in 1961. His best-known works are The Crossing (1948, Rockefeller Collections, New York City) and his large, powerful, nonrepresentational series of paintings in black and white, entitled Elegy to the Spanish Republic, consisting of more than 100 canvases inspired by the Spanish Civil War, and painted between 1949 and 1976. The use of large areas of color characterize Motherwell's later work, often called the Window-and-Wall series.