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Robert Motherwell: 191591, American painter and writer, b. Aberdeen,
Wash. Motherwell taught art at several colleges and during the early
1940s he became a cogent theoretician of abstract expressionism. His
canvases are characterized by large, amorphous shapes, painted in
strong, austere colors. His most famous body of work is a series of
over 100 paintings entitled Elegy for the Spanish Republic (194890).
He also created numerous masterful collages. He was married for several
years to the painter Helen Frankenthaler. Motherwell edited Documents
of Modern Art (15 vol., 194461), Modern Artists in America (1952),
The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), and Documents of 20th-Century
Art (197180). His keen critical powers and abundant intellectual
gifts are evident in his many essays, brought together in The Collected
Writings of Robert Motherwell (1993).
See biographies by H. H. Arnason and S. P. Breckinridge (1982), D.
Ashton and J. Flam (1983), and R. S. Mattison (1989).
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