"The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world.", Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, printmaker, editor, and one of the founders of the New York School. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, and raised largely on the Pacific Coast because of severe asthma, he received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and studied briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco before pursuing graduate work in philosophy at Harvard and at Columbia, where he turned decisively toward painting under the encouragement of the art historian Meyer Schapiro. He committed himself to art as a serious profession in 1941, and within a few years was working in the small Manhattan circle out of which Abstract Expressionism would emerge.
He was the youngest of the founding generation of the New York School, the cohort that also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb, and the most intellectually articulate of its members. He directed the influential Documents of Modern Art book series from 1944 to 1952, taught painting at Hunter College and Columbia, and produced over a working life of half a century the major series for which he is now best known: more than 150 Elegies to the Spanish Republic (begun in 1948 and continued for some twenty-five years), the Open paintings, the Beside the Sea series, and an extensive body of prints and collages. From 1958 to 1971 he was married to the painter Helen Frankenthaler. His work is held in essentially every major collection of postwar American art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.