“To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.”

In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline — who set out to change the face of American painting. These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. Their interest was in exploring the deeper sense of reality beyond the recognizable image. Influenced by the Surrealists, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to New York, the Abstract Expressionists sought to create essential images that revealed emotional truth and authenticity of feeling.

Robert Motherwell was the youngest and most prolific of the group. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell first hoped to be a philosopher. His studies at Stanford and Harvard brought him into contact with the great American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who first challenged him with the notion of abstraction. What he took from Whitehead was the sense that abstraction was the process of peeling away the inessential and presenting the necessary. After moving to New York and becoming acquainted with a number of artists, Motherwell recognized in them similar desires.

Living in Greenwich Village, he became part of an exciting group of young artists. Forming a community and living on what little they had, the Abstract Expressionists made daring experiments in painting and in the intellectual investigations surrounding it. Their break with the traditional art conventions often provoked the harshest criticism from the establishment. Despite this, these early years were an incredibly productive period for Motherwell—seeing him experiment in a range of media, from painting to collage. His work often expressed the actions of the artist through dramatic and bright brush strokes. Valued for their energetic imagery, they attempted a pure emotional response made real in paint. His collage also concerned itself with an awareness of the presence of the artist in a work. Using torn paper on minimalist backgrounds, he created work that was at once discordant and lyrical.

Beyond his individual efforts as an artist, Motherwell played a major role in the intellectual and artistic development of the underground New York art world of the time.

Reflecting on those early years, he spoke of their belief that “if the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting.” It was this revolutionary sensibility that determined both his life and his art. This work, however, grew not simply from a desire to present a new American art form, but a need to express the major human themes in paint. Like the great masters, Motherwell’s importance can be seen in his attempts at expressing something monumental.

With the advent of Pop Art and its concentration on popular culture themes, the art public began to long for the idealism of the Abstract Expressionists. In relation to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Motherwell’s large abstract paintings began to achieve a majesty in the public eye. Motherwell’s politics and spirituality were welcome reminders of a time when one could make art that did not engage the cynicism of a post-modern era. No longer the black sheep of the art world, Motherwell began to enjoy the fruits of years of dedicated work. It seemed, however, for many of the Abstract Expressionists that the newly found appreciation could not counteract the turbulence of those early years—many dying young or taking their own lives. Though somewhat alone, Motherwell committed himself to producing highly experimental work of emotional depth for the rest of his life. On July 16, 1991, at the age of 76 he died: the last of the great Abstract Expressionists. From the 1949 painting, AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON, until the end of his life, Motherwell continued his search for a personal and political voice in abstraction. This search produced a body of work that remains a testament to the human soul and its persistence, and to the genre of abstract painting out of which it came.

In the lower part of Manhattan, between Houston and 14th Street, and from the Hudson River to Broadway, is what is known as Greenwich Village. Today, the neighborhood closest to the Hudson is known as the West Village. The area between Broadway and the East River, which has long been known as the Lower East Side, is often called the East Village. For nearly all of the 20th century Greenwich Village was a central location for artists and innovators from around the world. The neighborhood, which had begun as a prosperous residential area during colonial times and had become a tenement district in the nineteenth century, began to attract artists and bohemians from around the country. Its central location and inexpensive rent made it desirable among those artists who longed to be in New York.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the budding artistic neighborhood found itself home to many performing artists. With the continued presence of vaudeville theaters, Greenwich Village provided plenty of opportunities for acts of all kinds. One of the first great venues was the Greenwich Village Follies, where dancers and musicians such as Martha Graham and Cole Porter got their start. For actors, playwrights and anyone in the theater industry, the Village was a lively environment. Many early Group Theatre members such as Harold Clurman first performed at small local theaters there. By the 1940s, the Village would be an international meeting ground for writers in nearly every genre. It was where a young James Baldwin was first introduced to a larger writing community, and where Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were involved in the left-wing political movement of the time.

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the Village hit its most active time, as musicians, poets, and especially visual artists began to flock there. Two of the most exciting American movements were calling Greenwich Village their home. Nearly all of the Abstract Expressionists, including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko lived in the neighborhood. Simultaneously, the New York School of Poets was sharing the same bars, restaurants, and lofts. By the 1950s and 1960s, Greenwich Village was attracting the furthest ranges of diverse creative minds, among whom composer John Cage, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and dancers Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, and Murray Louis were only a few.

In the late 1960s personalities like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed increased the publicity of this already popular neighborhood, making it increasingly desirable and expensive. As many began the transition to the less expensive Lower East Side, Greenwich Village went through its final phase with the influx of major artists organizations such as Negro Ensemble Company. Today, rising rent has made it nearly impossible for young artists to live in lower Manhattan, ending the reign of one of the most culturally impressive neighborhoods in American history.