Robert Motherwell

Wave

1989

In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists – including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline - who set out to change the face of American painting.
These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. Their interest was in exploring the deeper sense of reality beyond the recognizable image. Influenced by the Surrealists, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to New York, the Abstract Expressionists sought to create essential images that revealed emotional truth and authenticity of feeling.
Robert Motherwell was the youngest and most prolific of the group. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell first hoped to be a philosopher. His studies at Stanford and Harvard brought him into contact with the great American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who first challenged him with the notion of abstraction.
What he took from Whitehead was the sense that abstraction was the process of peeling away the inessential and presenting the necessary. After moving to New York and becoming acquainted with a number of artists, Motherwell recognized in them similar desires. Forming a community and living on what little they had, the Abstract Expressionists made daring experiments in painting and in the intellectual investigations surrounding
it. Their break with the traditional art conventions often provoked the harshest criticism from the establishment.
Despite this, these early years were an incredibly productive period for Motherwell - seeing him experiment in a range of media, from painting to collage. His work often expressed the actions of the artist through
dramatic and bright brush strokes. Valued for their energetic imagery, they attempted a pure emotional
response made real in paint. His collage also concerned itself with an awareness of the presence of the artist in a work. Using torn paper on minimalist backgrounds, he created work that was at once discordant and lyrical.