University. It was at Stanford that Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of symbolist and other literature, especially Mallarmé, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz. Literary reference became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings. However, his father urged him to pursue a more secure career and Motherwell states that the reason he went to Harvard was because he wanted to be a painter: "And finally after months of really a cold war he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then—it was actually the last year—Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."

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However, it was in 1940 that Motherwell would make an important decision. He moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by the great critic/writer Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Shapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists including Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Andre Masson; and arranged for Motherwell to study with the Swiss artist Kurt Seligmann.

Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of “automatic” drawings. Wolfgang Paalen would also have a profound impact on Motherwell, and his resulting drawings showed more plane graphic cadences and swelling ink-spots that referenced possible figurations. Motherwell would pass this information onto American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and William Baziotes; whom Motherwell befriended in New York shortly after a trip to Mexico. In 1991, shortly before he died, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen´s innovative role to the genesis of Abstract Expressionism and to the New York School.

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Robert Motherwell: "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. 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."

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In 1942 Motherwell began to exhibit his work in New York and in 1944 had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery. Also in 1944 MoMA became the first museum to purchase one of his works. From the mid-1940s, Motherwell was the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America, and his circle of friends included William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

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Throughout the 1950s Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where his students included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland. During this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, directed the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, and edited The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, published in 1951. Also, during the 1950's Motherwell's collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels that would become records of his daily life. He was married from 1958 to 1971, to Helen Frankenthaler, a successful abstract painter in her own right.

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Robert Motherwell’s paintings in which black nearly engulfs the surface reveal some of the most intense, meditative, and philosophically charged moments of his career. Though he is often associated with the bold contrasts of the Elegies or the open, floating rectangles of his Open Series, these nearly all-black works distill his lifelong preoccupations into their most concentrated form. Rather than functioning as monochromes, they operate as dense, turbulent fields where black becomes a living substance—charged with emotional and historical weight.

In these paintings, black asserts itself as both presence and pressure. Motherwell was deeply influenced by the drama of Spanish painting—from Goya’s Black Paintings to the somber contrasts of the Baroque—and he absorbed the idea that darkness carries moral and emotional gravity. His swaths of black paint feel less like an absence of light and more like an elemental force pushing outward from the canvas. Sweeping gestures, visible ridges of brushwork, and subtle tonal variations ensure that the surface remains active, almost breathing. Even when no other color breaks the field, the black is never simply uniform; it reveals a choreography of strokes, hesitations, and overpainting that makes the surface vibrate with life.

The near-total dominance of black also heightens the existential dimension central to Motherwell’s thinking. His writings show him grappling with politics, mortality, and the role of the artist in a precarious world. The engulfing black surfaces reflect that engagement: they are spaces of tension, of compression, of near-erasure where meaning emerges through struggle. Occasionally, small slivers of raw canvas or faint shifts in sheen interrupt the darkness, giving the viewer a sense of vulnerability or potential rupture. These moments underscore the idea that black, for Motherwell, is not a barrier but a site of conflict and revelation.

Spatially, these works produce a powerful ambiguity. Black fills the plane so fully that depth becomes uncertain—sometimes it feels like a flat curtain, at other times like an infinite recess. This oscillation destabilizes the viewer, creating a psychological space rather than a literal one. Scale magnifies this effect: confronted with a large, nearly black Motherwell canvas, viewers often describe a sense of being absorbed into the painting, as though the blackness extends beyond the frame.

Ultimately, Motherwell’s nearly black paintings stand as meditations on intensity—intensity of thought, of gesture, of color itself. They show him stripping away narrative, symbol, and contrast until only the raw encounter between artist, paint, and surface remains. In doing so, he created works that feel monumental not for their imagery, but for their emotional reach.

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