About

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on January 24, 1915. He was reared largely on the Pacific Coast and spent most of his school years in California, where he graduated from Stanford University in 1937. Motherwell also did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University and in 1940 he studied briefly at Columbia University.

In 1944 he had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Motherwell became the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America. In 1948, he began to work with his celebrated Elegy to the …