(Robert Motherwell obituary, continued)
become the New York School, and through him, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann. He joined Pollock, Baziotes and Matta in early experiments with automatism and argued, as he later told it, against their negative views of European culture.
Along with Pollock and Mark Rothko, he was one of the promising young artists encouraged by Peggy Guggenheim. He showed collages with others at her Art of This Century Gallery in 1943 and in 1944 had his first American solo show at the gallery. In that year, the Museum of Modern Art bought his painting "Pancho Villa Dead and Alive," in which could be seen the beginnings of the oval-and-rectangle oppositions of "Elegies."
In 1948, with Rothko, Baziotes and the sculptor David Hare, Mr. Motherwell founded an informal loft school on Eighth Street called "The Subjects of the Artist." A series of Friday evening lectures by vanguard artists, organized by Mr. Motherwell and Barnett Newman, it was open to the public and attracted large turnouts.
EIGHTH STREET CLUB WAS INFLUENTIAL
The school closed because of financial failure, but the evening meetings, continued in the later Abstract Expressionist organization known as the Eighth Street Club, were very influential in promulgating avant-garde views. In 1950, Mr. Motherwell was appointed to the graduate faculty at Hunter College, where he taught until 1958. By that time, the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists were a part of art history.
In 1969, when he separated from his third wife, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, Mr. Motherwell moved to Greenwich, Conn., establishing himself on a four-acre compound made from the "working quarters" of an old estate. There, at a comfortable distance from the distractions of the New York art world he had helped to create, he lived with his fourth wife, the photographer Renate Pensold, and carried on what he called his "cottage industries" -- painting, printmaking and collage -- in studios especially set up for each purpose. Working in relative seclusion, Mr. Motherwell regarded his crew of young assistants as a "family, one of my best weapons against age and loneliness."
He spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where he maintained a house and studio for nearly 50 years, and was considered more or less a local institution. There he enjoyed playing poker with friends in a game of long standing, and he was very much involved with a dozen artist cronies of middle age or older, in a cooperative exhibition space, the Long Point Gallery. He showed work in conjunction with the others, and took his turn in the program of solo exhibitions that was held there each summer.
Never one to underplay his honors and attainments, Mr. Motherwell nevertheless looked back with nostalgia at the early days before he and fellow members of the New York School achieved recognition. He compared what he called "the show biz aspect of the contemporary scene" with the "innocence" of the past.
"We were formed by the Depression, when the American dream lay in pieces on the floor," he once said. "The possibility of making money was inconceivable to us. America was innocent in relation to modern art, and no one cared. The reigning painters in
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