Giving Form to an Abstractionist’s Career

‘Among the advancedAmerican artists of his generation, the abstract painter Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was also the most deeply grounded in European culture,” writes Jack Flam, director of the Dedalus Foundation that Motherwell founded to support an appreciation of modern art, in the catalog of a new exhibition here. Considered either the youngest of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists or the oldest of its second-generation cohort, Motherwell was the most academically educated of them. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Stanford, then undertook graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, followed by graduate coursework in art history at Columbia. He also edited an authoritative anthology of the Dada painters and poets. Understandably, as Mr. Flam notes, Motherwell “advocated for paintings that were abstract but not necessarily nonobjective”—meaning that although they weren’t representational in the conventional sense, they somehow alluded, if only in their titles, to things and events in the real world.