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MOTHERWELL -- 2

New York and entered Columbia University as a graduate student in art history under Meyer Schapiro.

During this time Motherwell was introduced to the European emigré artists living in New York. His association with Gorky, de Kooning and Hofmann, as well as the Surrealists Max Ernst, Tanguy, Masson and Matta would have a lasting influence on him. He became interested in the Surrealist theory of psychic automatism and in 1941 traveled to Mexico with Matta, where he completed his first automatic drawings and his first major paintings. In 1942, after returning to New York, he permanently abandoned his university studies in favor of painting.

After World War II a new artistic movement, which Motherwell named the New York School, emerged. It became the first indigenous American style to wield international influence, and its originators included, along with Motherwell, Kline, Pollock, Rothko and Still. Motherwell's contribution to this new art was determined emphasis on the assimilation of modern European aesthetic values into American painting. His rich references to literary and philosophical concerns distinguish him from his fellow Abstract Expressionists.

Motherwell's work has not progressed towards a single characteristic image. Rather, the artist has continued to create new motifs and pictorial modes while reworking earlier ones. Much of his work is loosely grouped into series. Among the best known are the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series begun in 1948 and inspired by the Spanish revolution. Numbering nearly 150, they are almost all uniformly black and white with occasional passages of ocher or gray and consist of a few large vertical rectangles holding loosely ovoid shapes in suspension.
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