Altamira Elegy

Robert Motherwell was an American painter, printmaker, writer, and editor. His first solo exhibition was at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, New York (1944). In 1948, he co-founded the Subjects of the Artist School in New York with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and other prominent Abstract Expressionist artists. Also during the 1940s, he taught at Black Mountain College. An important art theorist, Motherwell edited the series Documents of Modern Art, to which he contributed The Dada Painters and Poets (1951).