Robert Motherwell; Dominant Figure in Abstract Art

Robert Motherwell, whose sometimes stark, sometimes brilliant canvases made him a formative and dominant presence in the world of Abstract Expressionism, has died.

Joan Banach, Motherwell’s curator in Greenwich, Conn., said Wednesday that he had suffered a stroke Tuesday at his summer home in Provincetown, Mass., and died on the way to a hospital. He was 76.

He was a founder and one of the final links to the brash American school of Abstractionism that, after its birth in the 1940s, quickly attracted devotees around the world.

A part of his best-known work, the series “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134,” brought $880,000 at auction in New York in 1989.

The series, which Motherwell painted over a 30-year period, uses dark, grotesque forms to suggest the end of Spanish liberty under Gen. Francisco Franco. He quit painting them after Franco died in 1975 and democracy was re-established in Spain.

“At first they were elegies of protest, protests against Franco, but they ended with the reconciliation elegy,” William Lieberman, chairman of the 20th-Century art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Motherwell called the 150 versions he completed over the years “general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation.”

Another of Motherwell’s elegies, a mural depicting the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was labeled “an outrage” and “hideous” by Boston critics when it was unveiled there in 1966.

A Boston curator said one of its shapes “may represent the profile of the President’s head, a very specific depiction of the most brutal moment of the tragedy” when Kennedy was shot.

The artist defended it not as a concept of death but “an expression of grief for someone dead, like a requiem Mass.”

Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Wash., the son of a bank president who moved the family to San Francisco when the artist was a child. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from Stanford University and worked on his doctorate at Harvard, afterward studying at the University of Grenoble in France and at Columbia University.

After traveling in Europe, he settled in New York in 1940.

Using alternately brilliant and bleak colors and odd shapes to convey his impressions, Motherwell drew on Cubists and Surrealists for his earliest inspirations.

Primarily self-taught, his work in the early 1940s consisted of ambitious collages and austere abstractions devoted to such disparate subjects as Spanish prisons or children’s toys.

As the 1940s ended, Motherwell expanded the focus of his art. From the little, satirical paintings he had been fashioning, he began spreading his work across large canvases.

He drew massive forms in earth tones or black, both often suggesting movement.

“Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” with its columnar thrusts juxtaposed beside odd masses, was considered a classic example.

In a 1984 interview in the New York Times, Motherwell said he was “groping for a way for synthesizing a lifetime of work--driving further what I find most valuable and dropping parts that seem less essential.”

Henry Seldis, the Los Angeles Times’ late art critic, said after viewing a Motherwell exhibit at the Otis Art Institute Gallery here in 1974 that he had “endured in his eminently successful attempt to seek out the essence of the nature of existence through his very own pictorial language.”

Motherwell also was considered unique among the New York school of Abstract Expressionists for his ability to change with the times and still be relevant.

The anthology “Contemporary Artists” notes that “instead of developing a single ‘trademark’ image like Mark Rothko’s soft rectangles or Jackson Pollock’s dripped-line maze, Motherwell has allowed his image world to evolve naturally, feeding on itself while taking additional nourishment from the art ideas that are in the air around him.”

In a 1983 article, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes called Motherwell “a painter of superb though admittedly fitful balance who has managed to raise a magisterial syntax of form over an undrainable pond of anxiety.”

Motherwell also became known for his writings about art, which appeared in publications such as the New Republic and Art News. He taught art for many years at Hunter College in New York.

Fellow abstract artist Carmen Cicero called Motherwell, a former teacher of his, “extraordinarily intelligent. Conversation with him was a true pleasure. He has both wit and profundity.”

Cicero also praised Motherwell’s teaching: “Three sentences from him regarding a painting was worth a semester from any other teacher.”

Said Chris Busa, editor of the annual Provincetown Arts:

He gave “the sense that you did not have to grow up in France to make a major painting, that you could grow up in Wyoming.”

Motherwell said he often lined up his paintings side by side to compare them, because “often the canvas tells you something. . . . It’s only by lining up a group of works to compare that I can see where I’m closer to my inner self and where I depart from it.”

Unlike many of his abstract contemporaries, Motherwell always acknowledged his debt to artists past. “One cannot wipe the historical slate clean,” he wrote in a catalogue issued in connection with his Otis Art Institute exhibition.

Most recently, Motherwell’s work reflected a new passion for brilliance. He explored acrylic paints and pure colors in a series of monochromatic canvases.

Among them was “Open No. 11,” an ochre expanse of Mexican walls, California deserts and a hint of bull-fighting arenas.

He often joked that if he had not been so prolific an artist, the price for his works would be higher.

His curator, Banach, said Motherwell’s home in Greenwich will be turned into a private museum. Many of his works will be donated to public institutions throughout the world.

Motherwell is survived by his wife, Renate, two daughters and one grandchild. From 1958 to 1971, he was married to noted artist Helen Frankenthaler.