ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-1991)

"...I have to say that then I belong...to a family of...earth-color painters in masses... Because Matisse is such a great colorist, don't forget that his greatest color is black. And other artists have this particular painting-mind. ...It's an earthy, broad-minded, unsentimental painting family which, like all families, contains mediocrities, but more rarely than, say, the much larger family of representational, fool-the-eye painters. ...a painter who uses dark tones...is something very different from thinking of black as a black color—in the sense that one thinks of fire-engine red as red, not as a tone..."
—Robert Motherwell