Robert Motherwell (1915–1991, American) was a seminal Abstract Expressionist painter and one of the youngest to belong to the New York School—a group of artists who produced non-objective, abstract work between 1940 and 1960 including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan. Motherwell had the most extensive and formal education of the group and is credited for important contributions to avant-garde art and thought. Printmaking contributed to an extraordinary benchmark in his career. He equally investigated the power of abstraction in his prints by distilling the monumentality of his large-scale paintings into smaller graphic compositions such as seen in the works that comprise London Series I.
–Affinities and Outliers: Highlights from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections