1926

Receives a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles

1930

Because of asthma is sent to Moran Preparatory School, Atascadero, in the

Southern California desert. Begins a self-directed education in art, learning to

draw by copying Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, Rembrandt’s portraits,

and Peter Rubens’ Marie de Medici series from book illustrations.

1932

Begins college at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, majoring in art.

Frustrated by the limitations of Stanford’s art department, which allowed students

little room for experimentation, Motherwell changed the focus of his studies

several times, ultimately earning a degree in philosophy in 1936

1935

Travels to Europe. Reads Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time

1936

Interest in the writing of Joyce intensifies during his last undergraduate year a

Stanford University. Fascinated by the elaborate organisation of joyce’s work, in

particular the dynamism of it’s style, and it’s fabric of indirection, ambiguity, and

plurality

1936

Enrols at Harvard University. Continues to study art, attending Lovejoy’s yearlong

seminar on the history of the idea of romanticism, where he is assigned The

Journal of Eugene Delacroix

1936

Attends a rally in San Francisco at which André Malraux speaks about the

Spanish Civil War

1938

In May travels to Paris to research Delacroix’s writing and enrols at the University

of Grenoble to study French. Translates Paul Signac’s D’Eugene Delacroix au

neo-impressionisme. Both his Delacroix notes and the translation of Signac’s text

were lost in the early days of World War II. Rents a studio on the rue Viscount in

Paris, where Honore de Balzac had his printing presses, and begins to paint

1938

While in France, becomes interested in the works of Pablo Picasso, who had

exhibited Guernica for the first time in 1937 at the Spanish Republic’s pavilion of

the Paris World’s Fair. Becomes aquatinted with Picasso’s 1935 series of etchings

Minotauromachy and the works that Picasso executed during 1937 that related to

the Spanish Civil War

1939

Is given his first exhibition of twelve paintings in the spring at the Raymond

Duncan Gallery in Paris, where the gallery owner himself a Californian, devoted

an exhibition each year to the work of a Californian artist living in Paris. Studies

briefly at the Academe Julian. Visits Delacroix exhibition in Zurich

1940

Returns to the United States and, at the suggestion of a family friend and artist

Lance Hart, accepts a one-year teaching post at the University of Oregon,

Eugene, where he begins to paint full-time, strongly influenced by Matisse,

Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Utrillo, and Georges Braque.

On the advice of Arthur Berger, an American composer whom he met in Paris,

applies to and is accepted into the Art History Department of Columbia

University’s graduate division in New York

1941

Travels to Mexico by boat on may 21st and spends the summer in Taxco with

Matta and his wife, Ann Matta-Clark. Barbara Reis, another engraving student of

Seligmann’s, travels with the Mattas and Motherwell. Through Matta and with the

introduction of Seligmann, meets Wolfgang Paalen who was living in a suburb of

Mexico City. At the end of the summer the Mattas and Reis return to New York,

but Motherwell, after meeting Paalen, decides to stay in Coyocan, near Paalen’s

studio, through November.

1942

Despite his challenging relationship with Surrealists, is invited - along with William

Baziotes, Joseph Cornell, and David Hare - to participate in First Papers of

Surrealism, an exhibition organised by Breton and installed at the Whitelaw-Reid

Mansion in New York, October

1943

In response to peggy Guggenheim’s invitation to participate in a collage exhibition

featuring European masters, constructs his first collage with Pollock in Pollock’s

Greenwich Village studio. The medium has a nominal impact on Pollock, but for

Motherwell the collage technique was a passage to multidimetionallity. His The

Joy of Living made its debut in Guggenheim’s exhibition and was purchased by

Masson’s benefactor Sadie may and later bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of

Art

1944

Makes the collage Mallarmes Swan. Aspects of Mallarmes vers libre exerted a

singular influence on Motherwell’s work and throughout, notably the symbol of the

swan from Mallames Les Vierge, le vivace et el bel aujourd’hui (The virgin, the

vivid and the splendid new day, 1887); Mallarme’s fascination with the idea of

azure as expresses in his early poem “L’Azur” 1864 as a symbol of purity; and

Mallarme’s imperative, “To paint, not the thing but the effect it produces”

1950- 1959

Took teaching post at Hunter College in New York

During the 1960s he turned to landscape of the mediteranean, favouring powerful blue and green

chromatic accents

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Cleveland Museum of Art

Denver Art Museum

Hara Museum, Tokyo

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

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.

Beyond his individual efforts as an artist, Motherwell played a major role in the intellectual and artistic

development of the underground New York art world of the time. Reflecting on those early years, he

spoke of their belief that "if the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract

Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting." It was this revolutionary

sensibility that determined both his life and his art. This work, however, grew not simply from a desire

to present a new American art form, but a need to express the major human themes in paint. Like the

great masters, Motherwell's importance can be seen in his attempts at expressing something

monumental.

With the advent of Pop Art and its concentration on popular culture themes, the art public began to

long for the idealism of the Abstract Expressionists. In relation to Andy Warhol's soup cans,

Motherwell's large abstract paintings began to achieve a majesty in the public eye. Motherwell's

politics and spirituality were welcome reminders of a time when one could make art that did not

engage the cynicism of a post-modern era. No longer the black sheep of the art world, Motherwell

began to enjoy the fruits of years of dedicated work. It seemed, however, for many of the Abstract

Expressionists that the newly found appreciation could not counteract the turbulence of those early

years-many dying young or taking their own lives. Though somewhat alone, Motherwell committed

himself to producing highly experimental work of emotional depth for the rest of his life.

On July 16, 1991, at the age of 76 he died: the last of the great Abstract Expressionists.

Galerie Bernd Klüser represents the Estate of Robert Motherwell (Dedalus Foundation, New York)

since 2001 and has exhibited works by the artist in numerous solo and group shows. It has further

supported and organised museum exhibitions and published catalogues on Motherwell´s oeuvre.

2005

Munich, Galerie Bernd Klüser, Paintings, Collages, Works on Paper

2004

Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich, V.I.P. 2 - Die Neuen

Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Das MoMA in Berlin

Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Robert Motherwell and Frank Stella: Prints from

the Permanent Collection

2003 Warsaw, Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Schloss Ujazdowski, Von

Picasso bis Warhol

Munich, Trökes Galerie Dube-Heynig, Fruhtrunk, Motherwell, Sonderborg,

Hartung, Vedova 1983 Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery 1959, 1964

Kassel, Documenta 2, 3 1944 New York, Art of This Century

2003

Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich

Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Robert Motherwell

2002

Munich, Galerie Bernd Klüser, Small Paintings and Works on Paper

2001

Munich, Galerie Bernd Klüser, A Dialogue with Literature