Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was the designated adult in the Abstract Expressionist room—the one who could actually explain what all the beautiful, chaotic canvases were about. Armed with a formidable intellect and a background in philosophy from Stanford and Harvard, he became the de facto spokesman for a movement more famous for its brawling than its elocution. Motherwell painted with a kind of controlled chaos, his most famous series being the somber "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," a collection of over 150 works that look like a heavyweight brawl between giant, inky black shapes. He was deeply influenced by the Surrealist idea of "automatism," letting the subconscious do the driving—a notion he picked up from European artists who had fled to New York. Rumor has it that at the lavish parties he and his then-wife Helen Frankenthaler hosted—they were known as "the golden couple"—Motherwell could be found in a corner, swirling a glass of expensive wine and psychoanalyzing the doodles on a cocktail napkin. Another whisper suggests that his famous collages, which often incorporated scraps like cigarette packs and letters, were less about profound statements and more about a pathological inability to throw anything away. These tales are, of course, of dubious veracity, but they add a certain splash of color to the man who brought a philosopher's mind to a painter's fight.