Biographies

Back in the U.S he studied art and archaeology at the University of Columbia and befriended some American and European Surrealist painters.

Motherwell had already visited Mexico with Roberto Matta but started his career as a self-taught artist and later learned engraving with Kurt Seligman and Stanley Hayter.

In 1944 he was in charge of the «Documents of Modern Art» magazine with Harold Rosenberg and launched the first issue of «Modern Artists in America» in 1952. He had already taken part in the 1942 Whitelaw- Reid Mansion Surrealist exhibition. At that time Surrealism enabled him to explore the possibilities of the freedom of human spirit and man's creative faculties through automatic writing, a method which played a considerable role in the resurgence of the American school of painting after the war.

However, his works produced in the late 1940's were never imbued with much Surrealism and were in fact moving towards to the lyrical abstraction trend.

Motherwell had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1944 and founded with Rothko and Baziotes an art school called «Subjects of the Artist» in 1948.
This venture led to the foundation of the School of New York on which Surrealism had very little influence. In fact the artists of the School of New York were above all exploring the resources of lyrical abstraction and until 1950, Motherwell tried to conciliate two trends, that is to say automatism and creative impulse under the distant influence of Surrealism and Kurt Schwitters with a preference for the works of Matisse whom he considered as the greatest artist of the 20th Century.

The influence of Schwitters could be found in his collages and cuttings while he started to teach at the Hunter College of New York in 1951. Two years later he married the artist Helen Frankenthaler and found his true style in 1954 with his palette giving a priority to black colour with white backgrounds and totemic forms detaching from them.

After 1960, Motherwell tried to produce simpler paintings sparing colours and forms and defining space more openly.

Motherwell became one of the major post-war painters in the U.S and had some great influence on many other artists. He took part in numerous exhibitions while many of his works were acquired by several museums in the U.S and abroad. His works are now rated between $ 30,000 and 180,000.

Motherwell was accused in France has having widened the gap between European and American artists as he was wrongly considered as an opponent of French art. It was true that he had a bad opinion of Souverbie's teaching when he attended the Beaux-Arts School in Paris during his sojourn in France between 1938 and 1939 and that he did not sense the meaning of roving French official exhibitions in the U.S after the war. Though he criticised the School of Paris for having shown some ostracism vis-à-vis other foreign schools during the 1930's, Motherwell was however much attached to the notion of the universal cultural heritage and was rather opposed to the idea of any pure national art.