Motherwell, Robert Burns (1915–1991)

US painter. He was associated with the New York school of action painting. Borrowing from Picasso, Matisse, and the surrealists, Motherwell's style of abstract expressionism retained some suggestion of the figurative. His works include the Elegies to the Spanish Republic (1949–76), a series of over 100 paintings devoted to the Spanish Civil War.

Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Motherwell was educated at Stanford Harvard, Grenoble, and Columbia universities. He first exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in New York 1942, and held his first independent exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, New York, in 1944.

He was general editor of Documents of Modern Art 1944–52, and Documents of Twentieth Century Art 1968–, and associate professor at Hunter College 1951–58.