Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) was one of the youngest members of the New York School and possibly the most scholarly. He read extensively—Stéphane Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Octavio Paz—and Symbolist literature was a theme in his paintings. Motherwell’s career started in the 1940s in New York, when he met the exiled Parisian Surrealists. A year later he decided painting would be his primary vocation, but that he would do something different. “What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around,” he said, “so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso.” Motherwell set about mark-making on paper, searching for a spontaneous artistic language. These works, which laid the foundation for the Abstract Expressionist movement, are the subject of “As Fast as the Mind Itself”—the most comprehensive show on the topic in decades. —Elena Clavarino