Robert Motherwell

1926 Receives a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles

1930 Because of asthma is sent to Moran Preparatory School, Atascadero, in the Southern California desert. Begins a self-directed education in art, learning to draw by copying Michelangelo¡¯s Sistine Chapel frescoes, Rembrandt¡¯s portraits, and Peter Rubens¡¯ Marie de Medici series from book illustrations.

1932 Begins college at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, majoring in art. Frustrated by the limitations of Stanford¡¯s art department, which allowed students little room for experimentation, Motherwell changed the focus of his studies several times, ultimately earning a degree in philosophy in 1936

1935 Travels to Europe. Reads Joyce¡¯s Ulysses for the first time

1936 Interest in the writing of Joyce intensifies during his last undergraduate year a Stanford University. Fascinated by the elaborate organisation of joyce¡¯s work, in particular the dynamism of it¡¯s style, and it¡¯s fabric of indirection, ambiguity, and plurality

1936 Enrols at Harvard University. Continues to study art, attending Lovejoy¡¯s yearlong seminar on the history of the idea of romanticism, where he is assigned The Journal of Eugene Delacroix.

1936 Attends a rally in San Francisco at which Andre Malraux speaks about the Spanish Civil War

1938 In May travels to Paris to research Delacroix¡¯s writing and enrols at the University of Grenoble to study French. Translates Paul Signac¡¯s D¡¯Eugene Delacroix au neo-impressionisme. Both his Delacroix notes and the translation of Signac¡¯s text were lost in the early days of World War II. Rents a studio on the rue Viscount in Paris, where Honore de Balzac had his printing presses, and begins to paint

1938 While in France, becomes interested in the works of Pablo Picasso, who had exhibited Guernica for the first time in 1937 at the Spanish Republic¡¯s pavilion of the Paris World¡¯s Fair. Becomes aquatinted with Picasso¡¯s 1935 series of etchings Minotauromachy and the works that Picasso executed during 1937 that related to the Spanish Civil War

1939 Is given his first exhibition of twelve paintings in the spring at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris, where the gallery owner himself a Californian, devoted an exhibition each year to the work of a Californian artist living in Paris. Studies briefly at the Academe Julian. Visits Delacroix exhibition in Zurich

1940 Returns to the United States and, at the suggestion of a family friend and artist Lance Hart, accepts a one-year teaching post at the University of Oregon, Eugene, where he begins to paint full-time, strongly influenced by Matisse, Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Utrillo, and Georges Braque. On the advice of Arthur Berger, an American composer whom he met in Paris, applies to and is accepted into the Art History Department of Columbia University¡¯s graduate division in New York

1941 Travels to Mexico by boat on may 21st and spends the summer in Taxco with Matta and his wife, Ann Matta-Clark. Barbara Reis, another engraving student of Seligmann¡¯s, travels with the Mattas and Motherwell. Through Matta and with the introduction of Seligmann, meets Wolfgang Paalen who was living in a suburb of Mexico City. At the end of the summer the Mattas and Reis return to New York, but Motherwell, after meeting Paalen, decides to stay in Coyocan, near Paalen¡¯s studio, through November.

1942 Despite his challenging relationship with Surrealists, is invited - along with William Baziotes, Joseph Cornell, and David Hare - to participate in First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition organised by Breton and installed at the Whitelaw-Reid Mansion in New York, October

1943 In response to peggy Guggenheim¡¯s invitation to participate in a collage exhibition featuring European masters, constructs his first collage with Pollock in Pollock¡¯s Greenwich Village studio. The medium has a nominal impact on Pollock, but for Motherwell the collage technique was a passage to multidimetionallity. His The Joy of Living made its debut in Guggenheim¡¯s exhibition and was purchased by Masson¡¯s benefactor Sadie may and later bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of Art

1944 Makes the collage Mallarmes Swan. Aspects of Mallarmes vers libre exerted a singular influence on Motherwell¡¯s work and throughout, notably the symbol of the swan from Mallames Les Vierge, le vivace et el bel aujourd¡¯hui (The virgin, the vivid and the splendid new day, 1887); Mallarme¡¯s fascination with the idea of azure as expresses in his early poem ¡°L¡¯Azur¡± 1864 as a symbol of purity; and Mallarme¡¯s imperative, ¡°To paint, not the thing but the effect it produces¡±