In 1940, Motherwell moved to New York to study at
Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Schapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (
Max Ernst,
Duchamp,
Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with
Kurt Seligmann. The time that Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be influential to his artistic process. After a 1941 voyage with
Roberto Matta to Mexico—on a boat where he met Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, an actress and his future wife—Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as
The Little Spanish Prison (1941) and
Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943). Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of "automatic" drawing or
automatism, which the Surrealists used to tap into their unconscious. The concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell, further augmented by his meeting with the artist
Wolfgang Paalen. Motherwell's encounter with Paalen prompted him to prolong his stay in Mexico for several months, in order to collaborate with him. Motherwell's noted
Mexican Sketchbook visually reflects the resulting change: while the first drawings are influenced by Matta and
Yves Tanguy, later drawings associated with Motherwell's time with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences and details distinguished from the earlier period. Paalen also introduced Motherwell to
André Breton, via a letter. Motherwell's seminal trip to Mexico has been described as a little-known but important factor in the history and aesthetics of abstract expressionism. In 1991, shortly before his death, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen's innovative role in the genesis of abstract expressionism. Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism: "What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it.
Gorky was copying
Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso.
De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do." Thus, in the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of abstract expressionism (or the New York School): "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism. He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. It was then that Baziotes and I went to see Pollock and de Kooning and
Hofmann and Kamrowski and Busa and several other people. And if we could come with something.
Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle. It sort of all began that way." Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine
VVV and a contributor to Wolfgang Paalen's journal
DYN, which was edited from 1942 to 1944 in six issues. He also edited Paalen's collected essays
Form and Sense in 1945 as the first issue of
Problems of Contemporary Art. In 1948 Motherwell executed the image which would prove to be the germ of the
Elegies to the Spanish Republic, one of his best known series of works. During 1947–48, Motherwell collaborated with the art critic
Harold Rosenberg and others to produce
Possibilities, an art review. During the latter year Motherwell created an image incorporating Rosenberg's poem "
The Bird for Every Bird", meant for inclusion in the review's second issue. The top half was a handwritten, stylized rendering of the poem's final three lines, and the bottom half was a visual element consisting of roughly rendered black ovoid and rectangular forms against a white background. The stark image was meant to "illustrate" the violent
imagery of the poem in an abstract, non-literal way; Motherwell therefore preferred the term "illumination". The second issue of
Possibilities did not materialize, and Motherwell placed the image in storage. He rediscovered it roughly one year later In 1948, Motherwell,
William Baziotes,
Barnett Newman,
David Hare, and
Mark Rothko founded the Subjects of the Artist School at 35 East 8th Street. Well-attended lectures were open to the public with speakers such as
Jean Arp,
John Cage and
Ad Reinhardt. The school failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949. Throughout the 1950s Motherwell taught painting at
Hunter College in New York and at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Cy Twombly,
Robert Rauschenberg and
Kenneth Noland studied under and were influenced by Motherwell. At this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, and in addition to directing the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, he edited
The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, which was published in 1951. From 1954 to 1958, during the break-up of his second marriage, he worked on a small series of paintings which incorporated the words
Je t'aime, expressing his most intimate and private feelings. His collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels, becoming records of his daily life. He was married for a third time, from 1958 to 1971, to fellow abstract painter
Helen Frankenthaler. Because Frankenthaler and Motherwell were both born into wealth and known to host lavish parties, the pair were known as "the golden couple". ==Mature years==