(Milwaukee, WI) The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University presents the exhibition Motherwell, Nevelson and Frankenthaler:  Sculpture and Works on Paper, featuring artwork by three of the most important and influential artists of the mid-20th Century.  The exhibition will open on Thursday, February 22 at 6p.m. with a gallery talk by Dr. Curtis L. Carter, Director of the Haggerty Museum.  A reception will follow from 7 - 8 p.m.  All opening events take place in the Museum.

The gift of twenty-four works includes lithographs and etchings by all three artists, featuring a Motherwell A La Pintura suite of aquatints from 1971,  a Nevelson painted blackwood sculpture titled "Distant Land," and various Frankenthaler lithographs including his "Yellow Jack" from 1987.

The works in the exhibition were gifted to the Museum by Lillian Rojtman Berkman in 2000.  Berkman, who now resides in New York City, received an honorary doctorate degree from Marquette University in 1991 and was awarded the Kairos Award for distinguished service to the arts in 1992.  She is President of the Rojtman Foundation which was founded in Milwaukee in 1956 by Berkman and her husband, the late Marc B. Rojtman, to enhance art appreciation and understanding among students.  Gifts of Old Master paintings from the Rojtmanís personal collection presented to Marquette in 1958 were instrumental to the founding of the Haggerty Museum in 1984.

"This gift brings important works to the expanding Haggerty collection of modern prints by major American artists," says Museum Director, Dr. Curtis L. Carter.

Robert Motherwell became well known as an Abstract Expressionist painter under the influence of Jackson Pollock.  Like many of his counterparts, Motherwell was interested in the automatic or subconscious application of paint in which accidents and spontaneous moments become integral to the work.  Having studied psychology as a college student, Motherwell was also interested in Surrealism, a movement that explores the motivations of the human psyche and is most often associated with artists like Salvador Dali.  In 1961 Motherwell began making limited edition prints of his work.

Louise Nevelson has been called the most celebrated female sculptor in the history of American modernism.  Her signature work was a monochromatic assemblage that used Cubist techniques to fragment architectural elements and found objects.  Wooden debris was combined inside of multiple box shapes which were then stacked on top of one another to create free standing walls.  The boxes were often painted black or white, distancing the parts from their original intent and focusing attention on the formal qualities of assemblage.

Helen Frankenthaler is often considered a "second generation"Abstract Expressionist, following the discoveries of Pollock and Willem de Kooning.  Her innovation was the advancement of the "stain painting" technique in which she poured paint directly onto an unprimed canvas surface, allowing the color to soak into its support rather than painting on top of an already sealed canvas.  This intuitive process, which was critical to the development of the Colorfield painters, allowed the flowing washes of pigment to take their own shape.