Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915. He studied philosophy at Stanford University, California, and received his BA in 1937. Later that year he studied painting briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco before undertaking graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University from 1937 to 1938. While spending a year in France studying French literature and painting, Motherwell had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Duncan. He returned to the United States in 1940; during that decade Motherwell emerged as a leading Abstract Expressionist whose work encompassed painting, printmaking, and collage, in addition to writing. In 1949 Motherwell began his most famous series, "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," which includes more than one hundred oil paintings and numerous sketches and drawings.
National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)
