(Robert Motherwell obituary, continued)
A FELLOWSHIP AT AGE 12
Born on Jan. 24, 1915, in Aberdeen, Wash., the son of a banker, Robert Burns Motherwell 3d showed his artistic talent early by winning a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of 12. Later, as a philosophy student at Stanford University, he made his first real connection with modern art when a tennis partner invited him to see the paintings by Henri Matisse in the Palo Alto home of Michael Stein, a brother of Gertrude Stein.
He felt "a shock of recognition," as he later put it. "I knew that was the kind of thing I wanted to do."
His interest in Matisse led him to steep himself in modern French culture, with particular emphasis on poetry from Baudelaire to Valery. Doing graduate study in esthetics at Harvard to prepare for teaching -- a pact he had made with his father, who felt he should have a "career insurance policy" -- he wrote a thesis on the painter Eugene Delacroix. He went to France in 1938 and stayed for more than a year. In Paris, living in a Left Bank pension, he painted, frequented cafes and had his first one-man show.
Back home in 1939, while teaching a painting course at the University of Oregon, he learned of the influential classes being conducted at Columbia University by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. He went to New York, enrolled at Columbia and became involved in what was to be the high drama of Abstract Expressionism.
Through Mr. Schapiro and others, he met the group of Surrealist artists in exile in New York during World War II, among them Kurt Seligmann, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta and the poet Andre Breton. Uninterested in the figurative subject matter or the political implications of Surrealism, whose aim was to effect revolution, he nevertheless took to its theory of "psychic automatism," which accorded with his feeling for Freudian psycho-analysis and the work of the French Symbolist poets.
FREE ASSOCIATION WITH A BRUSH
The method of psychic automatism, or "artful scribbling," as Mr. Motherwell came to call it, involved a kind of free association in which the pen or brush was allowed to wander on a surface, undirected by the conscious mind. "You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't by oneself," was Mr. Motherwell's description of the process. "It's essential to fracture influences in the same way that free association in psychoanlysis helps to fracture one's social self-deceptions."
He used the technique in all of his work. It related to the way Abstract Expressionist imagery was developed, allowing such factors as "accidents," surface incidents, the texture of materials and the color of the paint to play a role in the process. In Mr. Motherwell's work, the physical act of painting can always be read.
In the early 1940s, through his friendship with Matta, the Chilean painter, Mr. Motherwell got to know William Baziotes, one of the burgeoning group of young painters who were to
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