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Robert Motherwell [1915-1991] is considered the leading spokesman for abstract expressionism. For a time, he was married to Helen Frankenthaler — also an American abstract expressionist painter whose work I love and encourage you to explore.

Motherwell’s training in philosophy prepared him to speak for abstract art, as he described the cognitive process involved, offered paint process theory, and championed non-objective work. Motherwell explores the artist’s role in modern society. He clarified the philosophical basis for abstraction and is associated with publications of “The Modern Painter’s World” (1942), “The School of New York” (1951), and “A Process of Painting” (1963).

TRANSCENDING LITERALISM

In 1941, Motherwell met Chilean artist Roberto Matta who introduced him to a painting and drawing process called ‘automatism’ — a free-style process that Surrealists were using to access unconscious content for their work. Sharing Freud’s views of the unconscious, this grew into ‘plastic automatism’ as a method for accessing unconscious material directly, without words — like music.

Motherwell is recorded as stating that Americans could “paint like angels” if they were to have a “creative principle” to guide them. Such a foundation for this principle did appear earlier, in 1911, when Kandinsky published, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, calling for a spiritual revolution in art. A Russian national, Kandinsky sought to free art from the bonds of material reality and focused on art as an expression of ‘inner necessity’. His insights will later inform the work of John Dewy (Art as Experience) and Anton Ehrenzweig (The Hidden Order of Art).

A NEW OLD IDEA

In about 350 BCE, Aristotle published De Anima Book III, postulating that human intellect passes from “it’s original state in which it does not think to a subsequent state in which it does.” All leading Christian, Islamic, and Jewish scholars import Aristotle’s observation through their respective religious outposts. 

For Christians, this includes Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Tiger of Brabant, Jean de la Rochelle, and Roger Bacon. For Muslims, this includes Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Ibn Bajjah. 

For Jews, this was accomplished by Maimonides in the “Guide for the Perplexed” (Sekel Ha’poel), and echoed by Judah Abrabanel and Solomon Ibn Gabirol with minor variation.

HOW ACTIVE IS YOUR INTELLECT?

This active intellect was viewed as an intermediary between the human and divine realms, the basis for prophecy, human perfection, and cosmological order.  Today, neuroscientists reinterpret this intellect as the fluid intelligence network, a purely biological event without transcendent implications.

The difference is literally eternal.

In the pre-modern world, people relied on organized religion to make meaning out of birth, life, joy and suffering, and finally, death. In the post-modern world, people are increasingly left to their own devices.

This is not an argument against the meaning of religion entirely, where certain spiritual quests still speak. But it is an argument that art, like nature, is both corridor and grand hall of transcendent experience.

Marsha Plafkin Hurwitz

March 10, 2026