The Modern to Mount First Major Motherwell Exhibition in a Quarter Century

Dr Marla Price, director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is pleased to announce Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, the first exhibition in more than a quarter century to examine the work of Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), a major figure who shaped postwar art.

The Modern is an especially fitting venue to mount this exhibition given its longstanding institutional commitment to the artist’s work, which dates back to the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the Modern holds more than seventy works by Motherwell in its permanent collection, in a variety of media ranging from paintings, collages, and prints. The assembly presented in this retrospective and catalogue represent a tribute to the success of his influential oeuvre, making special note of his organic revisionism.

Robert Motherwell
Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue, 1974
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
48 x 108 inches
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The current exhibition is organized by guest curator Susan Davidson and features a selection of fifty-six visually compelling works from throughout the artist’s career, including twelve paintings from the Modern’s collection. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue offer new insights into his evolution as an artist and his impact on Modernism. Although he was equally proficient as a collagist, printmaker, and draftsman, it is Motherwell’s expansive sense of painting that this retrospective explores. Beginning with the abstract figurative works that dominated Motherwell’s first decade of painting as he emerged in the New York art world of the early 1940s, the exhibition highlights the depth of his fifty-year career. The artist explored the nuances of abstraction in key series that defined his oeuvre, including Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Je t’aime, and Open. Motherwell invested his abstract paintings with both a profound and intellectual form of expressionism, and an expansive consciousness of historical traumas and injustices. He frequently invoked political subject matter and humanitarian themes, making his work especially relevant to audiences today. Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting offers a careful and thorough new reading of the artist’s development, revealing his fundamental desire to depict the unseen.

Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting will travel to Kunstforum Vienna and be on view from October 13, 2023 to January 14, 2024. The collaboration between institutions strengthens the Modern’s commitment to framing American art in an international context.

Robert Motherwell
The Garden Window, 1969
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
60 x 49 inches
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Modern’s long history with Robert Motherwell began in the 1960s and 1970s, when the museum acquired twenty-seven works on paper in various media. In the 1980s, former director E. A. Carmean Jr., a scholar of Motherwell’s work, expanded the collection to include eleven additional works, including an important large painting, Stephen’s Iron Crown, 1981. In the early summer of 1991, then-curator Dr Price visited Motherwell in his studio, and selected several works that formed the exhibition Robert Motherwell: The Open Door. The exhibition opened in February 1992, shortly after the artist’s death. At the invitation of the Dedalus Foundation (founded by Motherwell in 1981), in the early 1990s Dr Price traveled to New York to select seventeen important works to add to the Modern’s collection, followed by another sixteen works in 1999. Today, the Modern has a total of seventy-two works by the artist in its collection—a selection second only to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.