Robert Motherwell was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922. He studied at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union and later at the State University of Iowa and Yale University. He became a teacher and won several prizes for his paintings. His first exhibition was in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
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In 1956–57 he took a year off from teaching to work on a series of paintings that he called "The Human Abstract Series," which explored the origins of humanity. The following year he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he began to explore the origins of modernism in Western art.
In 1960 he moved to Argentina for a year before returning to New York City in 1961 to teach at Hunter College. In 1966 Motherwell received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to spend two years focusing on his painting and sculpture. From 1968–70 he taught at Columbia University's Teacher's College and in 1972 moved to California, where he continued to teach until his death in 1986.
In 1990 Motherwell was awarded a posthumous National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush.