Robert motherwell biography/artcarney

Robert Motherwell was born on January 24, in Aberdeen, Washington. He and his family then moved to San Francisco, California, where Motherwell spent much of his time by the Pacific Coast due to his asthmatic condition as a child.

There, he developed a love for the broad spaces and bright colors that later emerged as essential stylistic characteristics of his abstract paintings: the ultramarine blue of the sky and yellow ochre of the Californian hills.  

Between and , Motherwell briefly studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco and received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University before undertaking graduate work in Philosophy at Harvard University from to At Stanford, Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of Mallarmé, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz.

This passion stayed with him for the rest of his life and became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings.

In September of , Motherw