Robert Motherwell was born January 24, 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington. His family subsequently moved to San Francisco and he went on to study philosophy at Stanford University. After commencing to pursue his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, his interests shifted to art and art history and he went on to study with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. After settling in New York in 1941, Motherwell found himself associating with a new group of painters that were to become the core of the American Abstract expressionists, including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Motherwell’s educational pedigree and talent for writing gained him the reputation for being the intellectual of “The New York School,” a named that he coined. He began writing and lecturing on modern art and became associated with the group of American artists whose work had been influenced by the Surrealists’ ideas of automatism, a process of making art through subconscious free association.
Motherwell sought to create imagery that communicated the emotional truths of an authentic self and reflected a collective human consciousness. After a period of frustration, Motherwell experienced a renewal of experimentation and creativity between 1959 and 1960 out of which such ambiguous and sensorial paintings as Chi Ama, Crede developed. The work was purchased by The Phillips Collection in 1998.