Lot Essay
Robert Motherwell, artist and art historian, is best known for his series of Spanish Elegies paintings and his pioneering documentary studies on Dada and Surrealism. His intense interest in these movements and his direct analysis of the roots of modernism itself, in European literature especially, informed his paintings throughout his career.
In the simplest terms, we can see in the Spanish Elegies the combination of Gabriel Garcia Lorca's poetry and his study of Surrealist technique. His published captions to small studies for Spanish Elegies explain that he equated the surrealist term 'psychic automatism,' 'doodling' and 'artful scribbling' to his method of painting. The sequence of drawings shows several stages in which the characteristic black masses are filled areas of the orginal 'doodle' drawn in black in.
It is still surprising to me that most persons have failed to see the connections between 'artful scribbling' and the Spanish Elegies motif. The seeming contradiction disappears if one knows that nearly all the Spanish Elegies begin with 'artful scribbling'" (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York 1982, p. 116).
The series began in late 1948 and early 1949 when Motherwell agreed to illustrate a poem by Harold Rosenberg for the avant-garde periodical Possibilities. The two strong, black vertical ovals which dominate the 1949 painting, Granada and a small casein At Five in the Afternoon (after a Lorca poem) are the beginning of a series which in Arnason's words are, "among the most important paintings of the twentieth century... Motherwell paints Elegies as Renoir painted nudes or as Cezanne painted still lifes, as constants through which he examines the nature of painting, of the artist, and of the world he is interpreting. The subject is the blackness of death and the whiteness of vitality" (H. Arnason, ibid., p. 28).
Motherwell developed this series and regularly returned to the subject and forms of the Elegy, extending and amplifying the motif over the next forty years. This includes developing backgrounds in various colors and compressing and expanding the forms within the canvas. In the 1950s, for example, the forms become more geometric and frontal, and by the early 1960s, there is a stronger sense of architecture and the organic. Although the Elegies are normally somber works primarily painted in black and ochre, in Elegy to the Spanish Republic CIII, Motherwell chooses to relieve these forms with bright colors and a more spacious format, creating a more invigorating and optimistic painting. Elegy to the Spanish Republic CIII, 1965, belongs to an important group of Elegy paintings painted immediately before his first major New York retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1965, where it stood out has one of the stars of the exhibition, dominating the installation with its bright and dramatic use of form and color.
In the simplest terms, we can see in the Spanish Elegies the combination of Gabriel Garcia Lorca's poetry and his study of Surrealist technique. His published captions to small studies for Spanish Elegies explain that he equated the surrealist term 'psychic automatism,' 'doodling' and 'artful scribbling' to his method of painting. The sequence of drawings shows several stages in which the characteristic black masses are filled areas of the orginal 'doodle' drawn in black in.
It is still surprising to me that most persons have failed to see the connections between 'artful scribbling' and the Spanish Elegies motif. The seeming contradiction disappears if one knows that nearly all the Spanish Elegies begin with 'artful scribbling'" (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York 1982, p. 116).
The series began in late 1948 and early 1949 when Motherwell agreed to illustrate a poem by Harold Rosenberg for the avant-garde periodical Possibilities. The two strong, black vertical ovals which dominate the 1949 painting, Granada and a small casein At Five in the Afternoon (after a Lorca poem) are the beginning of a series which in Arnason's words are, "among the most important paintings of the twentieth century... Motherwell paints Elegies as Renoir painted nudes or as Cezanne painted still lifes, as constants through which he examines the nature of painting, of the artist, and of the world he is interpreting. The subject is the blackness of death and the whiteness of vitality" (H. Arnason, ibid., p. 28).
Motherwell developed this series and regularly returned to the subject and forms of the Elegy, extending and amplifying the motif over the next forty years. This includes developing backgrounds in various colors and compressing and expanding the forms within the canvas. In the 1950s, for example, the forms become more geometric and frontal, and by the early 1960s, there is a stronger sense of architecture and the organic. Although the Elegies are normally somber works primarily painted in black and ochre, in Elegy to the Spanish Republic CIII, Motherwell chooses to relieve these forms with bright colors and a more spacious format, creating a more invigorating and optimistic painting. Elegy to the Spanish Republic CIII, 1965, belongs to an important group of Elegy paintings painted immediately before his first major New York retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1965, where it stood out has one of the stars of the exhibition, dominating the installation with its bright and dramatic use of form and color.