Robert Motherwell Original Prints

About Robert Motherwell

Over the course of his prominent career, Robert Motherwell produced a remarkable body of work that is considered among the most consequential achievements in American post-war art. Along with his innovations in painting, drawing, and collage, Motherwell was an exceptional printmaker. He developed relationships with various workshops and presses, and eventually even purchased his own etching press to make editions in his studio.

Robert Motherwell was born in 1915, in Aberdeen, Washington. He received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1937. His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris in 1939. In September of 1940, Motherwell settled in New York and began to play a significant role in the foundations of a new movement of abstract expressionism, or the New York School. In 1944, he had his first solo show in the states at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery.

In 1946, Motherwell was given solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Throughout the 1950s, Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the summer of 1962, Motherwell resided at the artists’ colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the coastal landscape inspired his series of 64 paintings Beside the Sea . In 1965, he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to creating his celebrated paintings, drawings, and collages, Motherwell was an innovative printmaker, producing more than 500 works, 100 of which were made in his own studio. After working in large workshops like Universal Limited Art Editions and Hollander Workshop, Motherwell bought his own etching and lithograph press for his studio in Greenwich, Connecticut. He soon hired master printer Catherine Mosely, who worked with him until his death in 1991.

In the 1960s, Motherwell exhibited in the prestigious São Paulo Bienal, and was awarded his first major New York retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. During the 1970s, Motherwell was the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh and London. In 1983, a major retrospective of Motherwell’s work was mounted at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which travelled to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Seattle Art Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.