About the Artist

Running Elegy II, Red State (1983), part of Robert Motherwell's well-known Elegy series of prints, exemplifies his use of abstract form and gesture as a means of communicating emotion and thought. Motherwell strongly believed that meaning is conveyed through gesture and structure, in the bold black marks and red slashes. As an innovator of Abstract Expressionism, Motherwell played a major role in the history of modern American painting. He was the youngest and most prolific of the group of artists based in New York, where he continued to create new works until his death in 1991 at age 76.

Motherwell was a philosophy graduate of Stanford and Harvard, but showed early interest in art. His studies led him to Europe in the late 1930's where he obtained new insights into modern art. After his return to New York in 1940, Motherwell studied under the art historian Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University, and began experimenting with abstract gestures. He decided to devote himself completely to painting, a decision which held little promise for anything but hard work and probable discouragement. Yet, a few short years later, he was to find himself one of the leading figures in the best known American art movement, Abstract Expressionism. Motherwell's year in Europe placed him in a special position, allowing him to bridge not only the language barrier but also the aesthetic gulf which divided American artists from European surrealist artists in exile in New York, such as Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst.

Motherwell was active in the transformation of European Surrealism, a movement motivated by the human psyche, and he guided its assimilation and acceptance by fellow American artists. As his own art evolved, he came to believe that when you have a pre-determined idea, you have academic art by definition. This concept of allowing the form to dictate the idea rather than the idea dictate the form was a radical concept in the 1940's and became the basis for the Abstract Expressionism movement, which included Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning.

In the early 1940's, Motherwell experimented with lithography techniques at Atelier 17, a printing studio which attracted many young and promising artists in its day. It was not until the early 1960's that Motherwell returned to printmaking to explore his artistic theories. Similar to his paintings, Motherwell experimented in his prints with a limited range of motifs and colors. In Running Elegy II, Red State, dense black forms consume the white of the paper while bright red flashes of color add dramatic flair and guide the eye around the fluid forms. Motherwell's extensive use of black has dominated his paintings and prints. In his own words, Motherwell would "use black massively as a color form rather than an absence of color."

Also in the ASU Art Museum's collection is Robert Motherwell's painting Drawing with Red and Black Oval (1987). If you are interested in learning more about Motherwell's printing techniques and the role collaboration played in his artwork, read Reconciliation Elegy by Robert Motherwell and published by Rizzoli International in 1980. Also read Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds by Mary Ann Caws and published by Columbia University Press in 1996.

[top]