Items Similar to Large Robert Motherwell Lithograph Abstract Expressionist Lament for Lorca 1982
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 16
Robert MotherwellLarge Robert Motherwell Lithograph Abstract Expressionist Lament for Lorca 19821982
1982
$28,000
£21,218.08
€24,451.39
CA$39,599.73
A$42,586.19
CHF 22,770.92
MX$513,577.32
NOK 287,953.83
SEK 262,363.01
DKK 182,706.06
About the Item
Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991)
Lament for Lorca
1982
lithograph in colors on white Tyler Graphics Ltd. (TGL) handmade paper
Printed with full margins; initialed and numbered 30/52 in pencil, lower right.
Dimensions: 44 x 61 in. sheet (111.8 x 154.9 cm) Framed 48 x 65 (102 x 165cm).
Signature: Hand signed "RM" in pencil lower right
Numbered in pencil lower right; workshop chop mark lower right;
Edition 52 (plus Proofs)
Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, New York
Printer: Roger Campbell, Lee Funderburg, and Kenneth Tyler
Provenance: bears label from Gump's verso with original price of 29,000$,
Private Century City collection.
Literature:
Tyler Graphics: Catalogue Raisonne 1974-1985. Kenneth E. Tyler. NY: Abbeville Press, 1987, p. 247.; 413: RM32 Belknap 254.
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Between 1932 and 1937, Motherwell briefly studied painting at California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco and received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University. At Stanford, Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of symbolist and other literature, especially Mallarmé, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz. This passion stayed with Motherwell for the rest of his life and became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings. At the age of 20, Motherwell took a grand tour of Europe, accompanied by his father and sister. They began in Paris, France then traveled to Amalfi, Italy. The next stops were Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and London, England. The group ended their tour in Motherwell, Scotland.
Later at Harvard, Motherwell studied under Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and David Wite Prall. He spent a year in Paris to research the writings of Eugène Delacroix, where he met American composer Arthur Berger who advised him to continue his education at Columbia University, under Meyer Schapiro. In 1939, Lance Wood Hart, then a professor of drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, invited Motherwell to join him in Eugene, Ore., to assist in teaching his classes for a full semester.
In 1940, Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Schapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (Max Ernst, Duchamp, Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with Kurt Seligmann. The time that Motherwell spent under the influence of Surrealism proved to be influential to his artistic process. After a 1941 voyage with Roberto Matta to Mexico—on a boat where he met Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, an actress and his future wife—Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as The Little Spanish Prison (1941) and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943).
Roberto Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of "automatic" drawing or automatism, which the Surrealists used to tap into their unconscious. The concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell, further augmented by his meeting with the artist Wolfgang Paalen. Motherwell's encounter with Paalen prompted him to prolong his stay in Mexico for several months, in order to collaborate with him. Motherwell's noted Mexican Sketchbook visually reflects the resulting change: while the first drawings are influenced by Matta and Yves Tanguy, later drawings associated with Motherwell's time with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences and details distinguished from the earlier period. Paalen also introduced Motherwell to André Breton, via a letter. Motherwell's seminal trip to Mexico has been described as a little-known but important factor in the history and aesthetics of abstract expressionism. In 1991, shortly before his death, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen's innovative role in the genesis of abstract expressionism.
Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism: "What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Arshile Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do."
Thus, in the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of abstract expressionism (or the New York School): "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism. He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. It was then that William Baziotes and I went to see Pollock and de Kooning and Hans Hofmann and Gerome Kamrowski and Peter Busa and several other people. And if we could come with something. Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle. It sort of all began that way."
From the mid-1940s, Motherwell became the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America. His circle came to include William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, with whom he eventually started the Subjects of the Artist School (1948–1949). In 1949 Motherwell divorced Maria and in 1950 he married Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters.
Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor to Wolfgang Paalen's journal DYN, which was edited from 1942 to 1944 in six issues. He also edited Paalen's collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first issue of Problems of Contemporary Art. In 1948 Motherwell executed the image which would prove to be the germ of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, one of his best known series of works. During 1947–48, Motherwell collaborated with the art critic Harold Rosenberg and others to produce Possibilities, an art review. During the latter year Motherwell created an image incorporating Rosenberg's poem "The Bird for Every Bird" meant for inclusion in the review's second issue. In 1948, Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, David Hare, and Mark Rothko founded the Subjects of the Artist School at 35 East 8th Street. Well-attended lectures were open to the public with speakers such as Hans Jean Arp, John Cage and Ad Reinhardt. The school failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949. Throughout the 1950s Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland studied under and were influenced by Motherwell. At this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, and in addition to directing the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, he edited The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, which was published in 1951. From 1954 to 1958, during the break-up of his second marriage, he worked on a small series of paintings which incorporated the words Je t'aime, expressing his most intimate and private feelings. His collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels, becoming records of his daily life. He was married for a third time, from 1958 to 1971, to fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. Because Frankenthaler and Motherwell were both born into wealth and known
During the 1960s, Motherwell exhibited widely in both America and Europe and in 1965 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; this show subsequently traveled to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Essen, and Turin. In 1962, Motherwell and Frankenthaler spent the summer at the artists' colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the coastline inspired the Beside the Sea series of 64 paintings, the oil paint splashed with full force imitating the sea crashing on the shore in front of his studio. The 1963 untitled oil on canvas painting in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art exemplifies this stage in the artist's career.
In 1964, Motherwell created a mural-sized painting entitled Dublin 1916, with Black and Tan, which is in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, N.Y. The size and content suggest that Motherwell intended to create a monument to heroism in the tradition of the Pablo Picasso masterpiece, Guernica.
The late 1960s saw Motherwell using Gauloises packets and cartons in many collages, including an extensive series with the packets surrounded by bright red acrylic painting, often with incised lines in the painted areas.
In 1972 Motherwell married the artist-photographer Renate Ponsold and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where they lived in a carriage house with a hayloft aerie, a barn and a guest cottage adjoining a large studio. Motherwell set up different studios for different modes of production (painting, collage, printmaking) During the 1970s, he had retrospective exhibitions in several European cities, including Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh, and London. In 1977, Motherwell was given a major mural commission for the new wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
In 1983, a major retrospective exhibition of Motherwell's work, organized by Douglas G. Schultz, was held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. From 1983 to 1985, this exhibition was subsequently shown at major museums, Los Angeles County Museum of Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Another retrospective was shown in Mexico City, Monterey, and Fort Worth, Texas, in 1991.
In 1985, Motherwell was awarded the Edward Macdowell Medal.
In 1988, Motherwell worked with the publisher Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press on a limited edition of the modernist novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. Motherwell produced 40 lithographs for the project.
Motherwell died in Provincetown, Massachusetts on July 16, 1991. On his death, Clement Greenberg, champion of the New York School, left in little doubt his esteem for the artist, commenting that "although he is underrated today, in my opinion he was one of the very best of the abstract expressionist painters".
The Dedalus Foundation was set up by Robert Motherwell in 1981 to foster public understanding of modern art and modernism through its support of research, education, publications, and exhibitions.
On July 20, 1991, several hundred people attended a memorial service for Motherwell on the beach outside his Provincetown home. Among them were the writer Norman Mailer and the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, both Provincetown summer residents. Speakers included the poet Stanley Kunitz, who read a poem that was a favorite of Motherwell's, William Butler Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium. Others in attendance included family members, friends, other artists, and Senator Howard Metzenbaum, an acquaintance of Motherwell's.
Several major exhibitions of Motherwell's work have been held.
Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, New York (1944).
Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont (1957)
Galerie Heinz Berggruen, Paris, France (1961)
Pasadena Art Museum, California (1962)
Smith College Museum of Art (1963)
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1965)
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York (1965)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (1972–73, traveled)
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1973)
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey (1973)
Museo de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, Mexico (1975)
Stadtisches Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany (1976)
Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, France (1977)
Royal Academy of Art, London, England (1978)
The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs (1979)
Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain (1980)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1983, traveled)
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1985)
Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (1991–92, traveled)
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (1996–97, traveled)
Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2004–05)
Robert Motherwell. Three Poems by Octavio Paz, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca Spain (2008-09)
Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2011)
Motherwell and the Poets (Octavio Paz and Rafael Alberti), Fundación Juan March Madrid (2012)
Robert Motherwell: Lyric Suite, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015)
Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, (2023)
- Creator:Robert Motherwell (1915-1991, American)
- Creation Year:1982
- Dimensions:Height: 48 in (121.92 cm)Width: 65 in (165.1 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement Style:
- Period:
- Condition:In original frame, frame has light wear. framed under acrylic, minor toning to edges of paper. please see photos.
- Gallery Location:Surfside, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU38217434022
Robert Motherwell
The name of painter, printmaker and writer Robert Motherwell (1915–91) is often taken as synonymous with the New York School, whose name he coined. Motherwell was the youngest of this group of Abstract Expressionists working in art, dance, poetry and music in 1950s and '60s New York City, which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko.
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell had perhaps the broadest and best education of any of the New York School coterie, with an extensive background in philosophy, literature and art history. He earned a BA in philosophy in 1937 from Stanford University and was working toward a PhD in the subject at Harvard when he interrupted his studies for a yearlong trip to Europe, where he fell in love with European modernism.
After returning, in 1940 he enrolled Columbia to study art history. It was there that he met a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists, and encounter that proved influential on his style. Motherwell began to integrate the idea of “automatism” — unmediated gestures that reflect deeper psychological impulses — into his work, pioneering a new form of Abstract Expressionism that came to characterize the New York School.
Works like the 1967 Beside the Sea no. 45, an acrylic on canvas, and the 1966 lithograph New York International epitomize Motherwell’s use of simple shapes in boldly contrasting colors, executed in quick, gestural strokes that occasionally evoke figures, suggesting a latent narrative despite their obvious abstraction.
Throughout his career, Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College, in New York, and at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where his work influenced the likes of Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. His influence as one of the founding fathers of American Abstract Expressionism remains profound.
About the Seller
4.9
Platinum Seller
Premium sellers with a 4.7+ rating and 24-hour response times
Established in 1995
1stDibs seller since 2014
1,858 sales on 1stDibs
Typical response time: <1 hour
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Shipping from: Miami, FL
- Return Policy
More From This Seller
View AllAntoni Tapies Post Modern Abstract Expressionist Aquatint
By Antoni Tàpies
Located in Surfside, FL
Size includes frame. There is a plate impression at the image that leads me to believe this is an aquatint.
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquis of Tàpies (Catalan: 13 December 1923 – ...
Category
20th Century Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
1980s Abstract Expressionism Color Field Silkscreen Serigraph Print Pale Yellow
By Michael Steiner
Located in Surfside, FL
Michael Steiner, American, New York City (1945 - )
this is 49 of 160 from the edition.
Michael Steiner A leading member of the Bennington school, abstract artists associated with ...
Category
1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Screen
Abstract Latin American Art Spanish Catalan Lithograph Josep Guinovart New York
By Josep Guinovart Bertrán
Located in Surfside, FL
Guinovart, Josep (Spanish/Catalan, 1927-2007), Untitled Abstract, 1984, lithograph on paper, hand signed, dated and marked E.A. (artist's proof) in pencil at bottom, full sheet 26.75 x 22 inches, unframed.
Josep Guinovart (1927 –2007) was a Spanish Catalan painter most famous for his informalist or abstract expressionist work.
In 1941, he began to work as a decorator. Three years later, he started his studies at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de la Llotja (Art School of La Llotja) where he stayed until 1946.
He first exhibited his work in 1948 in Galerías Syla in Barcelona. In 1951, he produced his first engravings entitled 'Homage to Federico García Lorca'. Two years later, he was awarded a grant from the French Institute to study in Paris for nine months. Here he discovered the cubist works of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and travelled to Belgium, Holland and Germany.
On his return to Barcelona and after a period working as an illustrator and set designer, around 1957 he began moving towards abstract art. His work is highly unconventional and usually on a large scale, using a wide range of materials, three-dimensional objects and organic substances such as eggshell, earth and straw.
In 1962, he illustrated a book of poetry entitled Posies by Joan Salvat-Papasseit for the Ariel Editorial. He won many accolades for his work throughout the 1970s and 80s, including Spain's National Award for Plastic Arts in 1982. In 1994, a museum foundation dedicated to his art was inaugurated in Agramunt, his mother's birthplace to which he always felt a special attachment.
In 2006 he designed the winery Mas Blanch i Jové in La Pobla de Cérvoles (Lleida) and created The Artists' Vineyard, a project intended to mix sculptures and other art works from different artists in the middle of a vineyard. The Artists' Vineyard was inaugurated after his death in 2010 with the unveiling of his sculpture The Countryside Organ: a music instrument, 6 meters height, for the wind to sing the vines. This winery also displays the 10.5 meters work In Vino Veritas...
Category
1980s Abstract Abstract Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Large Format Modernist Abstract Lithograph Silkscreen Print Woman Artist
By Lydia Dona
Located in Surfside, FL
1982-84 Hunter College, New York (M.F.A.)
1978-80 School of Visual Arts, New York
1973-77 Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem (B.F.A.)
American, born in Romania
Lives and works in New York City
Solo Exhibitions
2008 Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York
2006 Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona
2005 Karpio + Facchini Gallery, Miami
Jacob Karpio Galeria, San Jose (Costa Rica)
2004 Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York
2001 Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan
2000 Von Lintel & Nusser, New York
Galerie Von Lintel & Nusser, Munich
1998 Galerie Thomas von Lintel, Munich
1997 Galerie des Archives, Paris
1995 Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal
L.A. Louver, Los Angeles
1994 Marc Jancou Gallery, London
Galerie des Archives, Paris
1993 Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam
Real Art Ways, Hartford (Connecticut)
1992 Tom Cugliani Gallery, New York
Galerie Marc Jancou, Zurich
Galerie des Archives, Paris
1989 Tom Cugliani Gallery, New York
Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam
Studied at bezalel from 1973 to 1977. And it was a very fascinating time because it was a highly conceptually based school. Very much influenced by Joseph Beuys, and European Conceptualism, I didn’t really like the atmosphere there that much, because it was dominated by male painters like Jörg Immendorf, Marcus Lupertz, and a few others. then came to New York to study at SVA for two years. New York in 1978 was exciting. I was very lucky to be in a class that was full of very bubbly and very energetic artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Tim Rollins, Moira Dryer, Frank Holliday, and Tom Cugliani (who later became one of my dealers).The eighties were dominated largely by Neo-Expressionist paintings. There were Germans, such as Baselitz, Kiefer, Richter, Penck, and the Italians, Clemente, Chia, Cucchi, Palladino as well as Schnabel, Fischl, Basquiat, Salle, and many others, but all of their paintings were figuratively based. But below the popular consent, there was a group of painters who were working more in the vein of what Stephen Westfall referred to as “Neo-Surrealism,” including George Condo, Jeffrey Wasserman, Kenneth Scharf, David Humphrey. However, I felt that Carroll Dunham and you were the only two painters who seemed to be less interested in the kind of narrative, lyrical, or let’s say, stationary composition. He belongs to the generation of Terry Winters, Elizabeth Murray, David Reed and Jonathan Lasker but in some strange way, if we’re looking back to the mid-eighties, we have to include New Image painters like Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney, and Robert Moskowitz who were working in between the figure and abstraction with a kind of condensation and compression, in relationship, lets say, to cartoon imagery. There are artists like Jeff Koons, or even Damien Hirst who took the Duchampian aspect and brought it into the continuity of his readymade. But for me, I see no difference between the crack in “Large Glass” and the drips in Jackson Pollock’s paintings. There was something that I felt in my own equation of the continuity between Paul Klee, Duchamp, Picabia, and, oddly enough, Clyfford Still.
What essentially is important is how different artists carry on a dialogue among themselves so that they can all keep their work vital. Whether from the abstract paintings of Richmond Burton, Fabian Marcaccio extending the borders of his paintings on to the wall, or Cady Noland’s early scattered installation, my own pre-occupation with machinery, urban environment, and the Duchampian models has always materialized in relationship to other forms of art making.
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2014 Drawing on Difference: An Ambition by Saul Ostrow and Lidija
Slavkovic, Studio Vendome Gallery, New York.
2013 Drawing on Habit: An Ambition by Saul Ostrow and Lidija Slavkovic,
South Carlton Beach and The Betsy-South Beach Exhibition Programs,
Art Basel, Miami Beach.
2013 Imprinted Pictures: Lydia Dona...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Screen
Alfred Ortega Bold Figurative Abstract Expressionist Oil Monoprint Painting
Located in Surfside, FL
Alfred Ortega (American, 20th C.)
Abstract Monoprint with wash
Ghost of Champs-Élysées (Paris, France)
Born in Philadelphia, Alfred Ortega studied painting and sculpture at the Pe...
Category
20th Century Abstract Paintings
Materials
Oil, Monoprint
Lyrical Abstract Expressionist Lithograph Cleve Gray Lithograph Silkscreen Print
By Cleve Gray
Located in Surfside, FL
Cleve Gray, American (1918-2004)
Composition, (1976)
serigraph or lithograph
Hand signed lower right, and editioned 9/50
Dimensions: 19.25 X 23.75 inches sheet.
unframed
Cleve Gray (1918 – 2004) was an American Abstract expressionist painter, who was also associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
Gray was born Cleve Ginsberg, the family changed their name to Gray in 1936. Gray attended the Ethical Culture School in New York City (1924–1932). From the age of 11 until the age of 14 he had his first formal art training with Antonia Nell, who had been a student of George Bellows. From 15 to 18 he attended the Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts; where he studied painting with Bartlett Hayes and won the Samuel F. B. Morse Prize for most promising art student. In 1940 he graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude, with a degree in Art and Archeology. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. At Princeton he studied painting with James C. Davis and Far Eastern Art with George Rowley, under whose supervision he wrote his thesis on Yuan dynasty landscape painting. Best known for his calligraphic abstractions which melded elements of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and traditional Chinese scroll painting. After graduation in 1941 Gray moved to Tucson, Arizona. In Arizona he exhibited his modernist landscape paintings and still lifes at the Alfred Messer Studio Gallery in Tucson. In 1942 he returned to New York and joined the United States Army. During World War II, he served in the signal intelligence service in Britain, France and Germany, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. After the liberation of Paris he was the first American GI to greet Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. He began informal art training with the French artists André Lhote and Jacques Villon, continuing his art studies in Paris after the war. Gray returned to the United States in 1946. In 1949 he moved to the house his parents had owned on a 94-acre property in Warren, Connecticut, and lived there for the rest of his life. In the 1960s he formed a close friendship with Barnett Newman. It was during this time that he experienced an artistic metamorphosis, dissolving his earlier cubist compositions in a sea of distilled color. This dramatic body of work marked the beginning of an artistic meditation that would last for over 40 years. The rigors of French modernism, the ethos of Abstract Expressionism and the meditative restraint of Chinese and Japanese scroll painting commingle with astounding affect. The atmospheric, subdued tones of his 1960s paintings gradually gave way to bright, monochromatic fields of color, hazily washed onto the canvas in stain like swathes. Much of his work from the last three decades of his career feature striking graphic brushwork that conjures the influence of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. He married the noted author Francine du Plessix on April 23, 1957. They worked in separate studios in two outbuildings with a driveway in between. Gray was a veteran of scores of exhibitions throughout his career, as listed below, from the early days Tucson, through to postwar Paris and New York, and most recently in 2002 at the Berry-Hill Gallery in New York City. His paintings are held in the collections of numerous prominent museums and institutions. In 2009 the art critic Karen Wilkin curated a posthumous retrospective of his work at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, and other posthumous exhibitions have been held.
Museum collections
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida
The Brooklyn Museum, New York City
Columbia University Art Gallery, New York City
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, New York City
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii
The Jewish Museum, New York City
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
The Newark Museum, New Jersey
Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Oklahoma City Art Center, Oklahoma
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.[14]
The Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey[6]
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
He was included in the show 1977, Group Exhibition, Betty Parsons Gallery. Mino Argento...
Category
1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Lithograph
You May Also Like
Lament for Lorca
By Robert Motherwell
Located in London, GB
Lithograph on white Tyler Graphics Ltd. (TGL) handmade paper
44x61 in (111.8x154.9cm)
Edition of 52
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Color, Lithograph
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163
By Robert Motherwell
Located in London, GB
Robert Motherwell
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163
1979-82
Acrylic and Conte crayon on board
59.1 x 74.3 cms (23 1/4 x 29 1/4 ins)
RM14159
P1061
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163 is a fine example of Robert Motherwell’s most acclaimed body of work, the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. As important as Barnett Newman’s zips and Jackson Pollock’s drips for their revolutionary contribution to art history, the Elegies are Motherwell’s most extensive series; he executed over 140 paintings using this motif, beginning in 1948 until his death in 1991. Nearly every major museum collection, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have in their permanent collection an Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Intended to be read as a lamentation or funeral song after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are a lyrical and poetic memorial to the immense human loss and suffering endured during these harrowing years.
Motherwell was a young student of twenty-one when the horrors of the Spanish Civil War commenced in 1936, and he would later reflect that it was the most “moving political event” of his youth. In 1939, the Spanish Civil War concluded with the fall of Spain’s democratically elected socialist government, which was deposed by a fascist coalition led by dictator Francisco Franco, whose dictatorship would persist until 1975. In 1948 nearly a decade after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell created his first Elegy with a small drawing to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg. Over the next four decades, Motherwell would pursue this same structural and thematic motif relentlessly; taken as a whole, the Elegies confirm the resounding impact that this war had on the young artist, and indeed stand as a powerful monument to the overwhelming loss during and in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell stated: “I meant the word 'elegy' in the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began…The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should not be forgotten, even though la guerre est finie.” (David Craven in Joan M...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings
Materials
Conté, Acrylic, Board
Price Upon Request
Untitled
By Robert Motherwell
Located in London, GB
Brushed aquatint, lift-ground etching and aquatint on German Etching paper
71.8 x 56.5 cms (28 1/4 x 22 1/4 ins)
Edition of 32
Category
1970s Abstract Abstract Prints
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
Elegy Fragment II
By Robert Motherwell
Located in London, GB
Aquatint, lift-ground etching and aquatint on Georges Duchene Hawthorne of Larroque handmade paper
87.6 x 61 cm (34 1/2 x 24 inches)
Edition of 52
Category
1980s Abstract Abstract Prints
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
Art 1981 Chicago Print
By Robert Motherwell
Located in New York, NY
Created by Robert Motherwell in 1981 for the Chicago International Art Exposition, Art 1981 Chicago Print is an original lithograph in colors on Arches p...
Category
20th Century Abstract Expressionist Prints and Multiples
Materials
Lithograph
Price Upon Request
Carpeta
By Robert Motherwell
Located in Toronto, Ontario
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, made up the quartet of abstract painters that radically defined Modern painting in Ameri...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Prints
Materials
Lithograph
