Robert Motherwell was an American artist and important Abstract Expressionist painter. Influenced by the automatic writing and drawing of Surrealism, his work features an intuitive approach to painting.
“Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself;. Born in 1915 in Aberdeen, WA, he moved to New York to study at Columbia University with the art historian Meyer Schapiro. It was Schapiro encouragement that motivated Motherwell to start painting. During the early 1940s, he joined with a group of young artists including: William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. They would go on to become the great American masters of Abstract Expressionism.
Motherwell died in 1991. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.
