Robert Burns Motherwell was born in Washington state and studied aesthetics at both Stanford and Harvard and started pursuing artmaking as an adult in 1941. Motherwell was a mostly self-taught artist, but was influenced by surrealist artists like Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst.

He became one of the most prominent American artists of the 20^th century and a founder of Abstract Expressionism with the large, gestural black forms he painted. By the 1960s, Motherwell began to incorporate accidental marks into his artwork much like Color Field painters of the time.

Until 1971, Motherwell was married to Helen Frankenthaler, a prominent American painter known for her large scale abstract color field paintings.

His artwork was included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Royal Academy in London, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City.