"I'm a novelty in that I'm somewhat a product of Harvard and I'm also somewhat of a painter," American artist Robert Motherwell said in a speech last night at the Carpenter Center.

Motherwell was referring to his graduate work in the Philosophy Department here. He said it taught him the "nature of abstraction"--so important to his paintings.

Motherwell spoke about the development of 20th century art and about his own development as an artist and showed hundreds of slides of his own work, and his studio at his home in Greenwich, Conn.

"My favorite artist of the 20th century is Matisse," Motherwell said. When he first saw a Matisse he decided to leave graduate school and go to France to study art, he added.

While slowing slides of his famous series, "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," Motherwell explained that he had tried to make his paintings "abstract enough to be ambivalent and to work on several different levels, but not so abstract that their origins can't be traced by someone acute enough to trace them"

Motherwell said he normally works on many things at once and "lets them grow like a garden." When he gets stuck on a painting he said, he often tries working on it in a frame, a technique Matisse had used.

Go For Size

"People wonder why modern art is so large," Motherwell said, responding to the audience's awe at the size of his murals. "The obvious answer never seems to occur to them. Lofts in New York City, where so much of the Expressionist Movement grew, are 100 feet long by 20 feet wide. The artist's tendency is to fill up the environment."

Explaining the abstraction of his works, Motherwell added, "I don't have a serial mind. "I can't think in time. I can't remember in a straight line."

Motherwell's speech was part of the Learning from Performers Series.