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Chi Ama, Crede

Collection item 1998.001.0001
  • Period Twentieth-Century
  • Materials Oil on canvas
  • Object Number 1998.001.0001
  • Dimensions 82 x 141 in.; 208.28 x 358.14 cm.
  • Credit Line Purchased by The Phillips Collection through funds donated by Special Director’s Discretionary Grant from the Judith Rothschild Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Philips, The Chisholm Foundation, The Whitehead Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin Phillips, Mr. and Mrs. Marc E. Leland, and the Honorable Ann Winkelman Brown and Donald A. Brown, 1998; © 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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.