The Elegies to the Spanish Republic and Variety of Imagery

Samuel Kootz announces the closing of his gallery in order to work as Picasso’s exclusive worldwide dealer.

Motherwell, William Baziotes, and the other artists who depended upon the monthly stipend from the gallery are left without a steady source of income.

During a blizzard, Motherwell paints Granada and The Voyage on a large roll of paper tacked to the wall. Still emotionally fragile after recent events, Motherwell considers destroying the new paintings, but Bradley Walker Tomlin talks him out of it.

In the fall, Motherwell rejoins the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, which reopens at 600 Madison Avenue after a one-year hiatus. The gallery’s first exhibition is The Intrasubjectives. The catalogue features an essay by Rosenberg, and brings together the artists who will later become known as the Abstract Expressionists: Baziotes, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Motherwell.

Motherwell travels to Reno, Nevada to obtain a divorce from Maria.

While there, he meets Betty Little, a woman from New York who will soon become his second wife.

In October, the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery presents an exhibition of collaborations between gallery artists and noted architects, including Walter Gropius. Motherwell works with the Architects Collaborative, a firm led by Gropius. He exhibits a maquette for a sixty-foot long mural he conceived for a junior high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts along with Mural Fragment, a triptych of three 8-by-4-foot Masonite panels based on a small section of the maquette.

Later that month, Motherwell delivers a lecture, “The New York School,” at the Midwestern College Art Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The lecture is the most cogent critical discussion to date of the new art being developed in New York.

On November 14, Motherwell: First Exhibition of Paintings in Three Years opens at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. It presents the first exhibition of the group of paintings Motherwell calls the “Elegies (To The Spanish Republic),” including Barcelona. Two other recent groups of paintings are also exhibited: “Capriccios” and “Wall Paintings.”

In December, Motherwell accepts a commission to paint a mural for a synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey, to be designed by the architect Percival Goodman. In preparation for painting the mural, Motherwell researches the history of Jewish art and iconography.

Seventeen Modern American Painters is exhibited at the Frank Perls Gallery, Beverly Hills, from January 11 to February 7. The exhibition catalogue features Motherwell’s essay “The New York School.”

In February, Motherwell joins the Graduate Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College. He will be made an assistant professor in 1952, granted tenure in 1953, and will teach at Hunter through 1959. He is instrumental in making Hunter one of the earliest graduate programs to teach modern art, and brings many artists onto the faculty, including Baziotes, Richard Lippold, Reinhardt, and Clyfford Still.

In May, Motherwell moves back to New York to be closer to Hunter College.

In October, Art for a Synagogue is shown at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. The exhibition features Percival Goodman’s designs for Congregation B’nai Israel synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey, and the artworks commissioned for it by Ferber, Gottlieb, and Motherwell, whose eight-by-sixteen foot mural for the building, The Wall of the Temple, is installed the following spring.

Cy Twombly’s first exhibition is held at the Seven Stairs Gallery and Bookstore in Chicago. Motherwell writes the catalogue essay for the show, stating, “I believe Cy Twombly is the most accomplished young painter whose work I happen to have encountered.”

Motherwell spends the summer in East Hampton. On June 30, a letter by seven members of the “Irascible” group is published in the New York Times protesting, once again, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s dismissive attitude towards modern art in its juried exhibitions.

Motherwell meets the poet Frank O’Hara, with whom he will collaborate on a number of projects.

On January 28, Motherwell’s daughter Jeannie is born.

In April, Motherwell purchases a three-story brownstone at 174 East Ninety-fourth Street, where he will live until 1971.

In April, Motherwell exhibits five small Elegy paintings at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery, including Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos), along with his first major series of collages since the late 1940s.

In October and November, Motherwell travels throughout Germany as part of an American delegation that includes Richard Lippold, architect Richard Neutra, designers Charles Eames and George Nelson, and John Coolidge, director of the Fogg Museum. The four-week trip is sponsored by the German government as part of the planning process for the post-war reconstruction of German cities.

In January, Motherwell leaves the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery after ten years.

During the first half of the year, Motherwell paints a number of Je t’aime paintings. He later describes the phrase “Je t’aime” that is inscribed in large cursive script across the center of each canvas as “a cry that I would like to love.”

In the Fall, Je t’aime No. II is included in The 1955 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Motherwell’s second daughter, Lise, is born on April 14.

In Februray, Shozo Shimamoto sends a letter to Motherwell to introduce the Gutai Art Group and ask him for a critique of their journal Gutai. For Motherwell, the interest of the Gutai artists represents a further affirmation of the international spirit of modernism.

In the summer, Motherwell purchases an eighteenth-century house at 622 Commercial Street in Provincetown.

In October, Motherwell joins the Sidney Janis Gallery.

Motherwell and Betty return to Provincetown for the summer. Realizing that their marital difficulties are unsurmountable, they decide to end their marriage.