Born in 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, Robert Motherwell showed an early talent for art, receiving a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, at the age of eleven. He subsequently studied briefly at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, in 1932, but his preference for academic study led him to complete his BA in philosophy at Stanford University in 1937.

After graduating, Motherwell initially intended to continue his philosophical studies, and to that end he relocated to New York City in 1940 to study with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. Schapiro, however, encouraged him to pursue his artistic practice. Motherwell quickly became an active member of the city’s robust art scene and met other artists working there at the time, such as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, and Willem de Kooning. In 1944, he gained acclaim from a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s influential gallery Art of This Century. Two years later, the San Francisco Museum of Art gave him another one-man show, and he was also included in the seminal Fourteen Americansexhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One of the leading American artists of the time, he held numerous teaching and lecture positions throughout the United States, and his work began to be shown in Europe.