Robert Motherwell was a famous American abstract painter and printmaker associated with the Abstraction Expressionism art movement. He is best known for his bold, gestural works using a limited palette with black being the lead. Famous Robert Motherwell artworks include “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110″, “The Little Spanish Prison”, “The Homely Protestant”, “Open No. 122 in Scarlet and Blue”, “Blue Elegy”, “The Voyage” and “Beside the Sea”.
Mini biography: Born Robert Motherwell on the 24th of January, 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, United States of America. His mother was Margaret Hogan and his father Robert Burns Motherwell II was the president of the Wells Fargo Bank. Motherwell married the Mexican actress Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyers in 1941 and they divorced in 1949. He married Betty Little in 1950 and they divorced in 1958. They had two children: Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell. He married the abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1958 and they divorced in 1971. Motherwell married Renate Ponsold in 1972. The artist died on the 16th of July, 1991 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA at the age of 76. Motherwell is buried at the Truro Snow Cemetery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States.
List of Famous Robert Motherwell Art Quotes
We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the ‘body-and-mind’ as a whole to the events of reality. Robert Motherwell
Caution is the enemy of art, and everyone is more cautious than he thinks he is. Robert Motherwell
The more anonymous a work, the less universal, because in some paradoxical way, we understand the universal through the personal. Robert Motherwell
I don’t exploit so-called ‘accidents’ in painting. I accept them if they seem appropriate. There is no such thing as an ‘accident’ really; it is a kind of casualness: it happened so let it be, so to speak. One doesn’t want a picture to look ‘made’ like an automobile or a loaf of bread in waxed paper. Robert Motherwell
It is Cezanne’s feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling. Robert Motherwell
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience – intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. Robert Motherwell
Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science. Robert Motherwell
We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content. Robert Motherwell
Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. Robert Motherwell
The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd. Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell Self-Portrait Painting
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Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and other Famous American Artists.
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