“In the beginning was the brush,” declared Robert Motherwell, an integral member of The New York School of Abstract Expressionism that began in the wake of WWII. The painter created several large-scale painting series such as Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Beside the Sea, Lyric Suite, and Open, that were repositories for his own philosophical approach to his painting practice. Alongside his canvases, the artist maintained a lifelong interest in drawing and printing which both played an essential role as creative outlets that worked to balance the weighty work of modernist painting. He constructed several collages, drawings, and lithographs, working with materials such as ink, oils, charcoal, acrylic, and mixed media that would also include non-traditional materials like cigarette wrappers, stamps, mailing labels, and sand to create layers of intriguing textures and patterns. Of these mixed media works, Motherwell stated, “For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.”

In White with Green Stripe is a wonderful example of Motherwell’s collages of the 1980s. This late period of his life and art mark a much more fluid and experimental phase of his works, as he is primarily known for the austerity of his black and white paintings. The thick foundational off-white paper contains a deeply embossed frame in the middle. Glued to either side of the embossed frame are various pieces of torn and cut papers. The left side of the construction mirrors Motherwell’s iconic blacks and whites, with one revealing musical notes. To the right is a long bright green stripe, a bold statement of color that perfectly balances the two areas. Motherwell was an intuitive printmaker with an intrigue for the materiality of these collages. He set up an elaborate print studio inside his home in Greenwich, Connecticut that included assistants and master printers who helped him make and reproduce his prints in a personal setting. After many years of working in solitude, the collaboration of printmaking offered a welcome change. 

With a career spanning over five decades, Motherwell was the youngest member of the American Abstract Expressionists whom he designated The New York School. The artist studied philosophy at Stanford University, art history at Columbia University under the art historian Meyer Shapiro, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lectured at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—where he taught Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly—and later at Hunter College in New York. Motherwell founded the Dedalus Foundation in 1981 in order to foster public understanding of modern art and modernism. He exhibited worldwide, and his work can be found in the collections of major art institutions including Tate, London; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among many others.