Private Collection 18" x 13.50" (Attrib.) with Certificate, Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington on January 24, 1915, the first child of Robert Burns Motherwell the 2nd and Margaret Hogan Motherwell. The family later moved to San Francisco , where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank . Due to the artist's asthmatic condition, Motherwell was reared largely on the Pacific Coast and spent most of his school years in California. There he developed a love for the broad spaces and bright colours that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract paintings (ultramarine blue of the sky and ochre yellow of Californian hills). His later concern with themes of mortality can likewise be traced to his frail health as a child

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