Lyric Suite: Selected Works by Robert Motherwell

In addition to a long and prolific career as a painter, American artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) was a dedicated teacher, a scholar of art and literature, and a champion of fellow artists. He was the youngest member of the “New York School” of Abstract Expressionists, whose name he coined and for whom he was a theorist and spokesman.

With his wide array of intellectual interests—from French Symbolist poetry to philosophy, music, and modernist painting—Motherwell provided a critical link between European artists and his American contemporaries. The works in this gallery have been assembled from the permanent collection and from the holdings of the Dedalus Foundation, founded by Motherwell in 1981, to mark the centenary of the artist’s birth and to convey the broad range of his artistic activity, from monumental paintings (his work is also installed in gallery 920), to collages, prints, and illustrated books.