A painting of profoundly elegiac beauty, Spanish Elegy offers an intimate glimpse into Robert Motherwell’s most ambitious undertaking, his revered Elegies to the Spanish Republic. Intended to be read as a lamentation after the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are just that – lyrical and poetic memorials to the immense human loss and suffering that Spain endured during these tormenting years. Demonstrating the crucial hallmarks of the Elegy paintings, Spanish Elegy articulates Motherwell’s iconic compositional structure of black rectangular slabs and compressed ovoid forms set against a white canvas. Painted in 1959, a decade after Motherwell created his first Elegy in 1948, Spanish Elegy ambitiously translates the tremendous painterly force of Motherwell’s monumental paintings into an intimate and poignant format.

On par with Barnett Newman’s zips and Jackson Pollock’s drips for their revolutionary contribution to art history, the Elegies serve almost as personal poetic form for Motherwell. The recurring motif that defines these revered compositions first appeared in 1948 in a pen and ink drawing by Motherwell, which was intended to be published with a poem by Harold Rosenberg. Motherwell returned to the composition a year later in a small painting titled At Five in the Afternoon, which acts as the first entry into his Elegies as well as sets up the formal and aesthetic qualities that would define the entire series. Contemplating the significance, both public and personal, of these compositions, Motherwell explains: “Unlike the rest of my work, the Elegies are, for the most part, public stat.mes nts. The Elegies reflect the internationalist in me, interested in the historical forces of the twentieth century, with strong feelings about the conflicting forces in it.” (New York, Jack Flam, Motherwell, 1991, p. 24) Motherwell was a young-student of twenty-one when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and he would later reflect that it was the most “moving political movement” of his youth. (Exh. Cat., New York, Dominique Lévy, Robert Motherwell: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 2015, p. 6) The three-year battle killed more than 700,000 people in combat and occasioned the first air-raid bombings s of civilians in history. Echoing on the tremendous atrocities that occurred during dictator Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, Motherwell began his series Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a group of works that comprises of over 200 paintings.

Elegiac in tone and tragic in feeling, Spanish Elegy articulates Motherwell’s signature dramatic architectonic rectangular slabs compressing an oval-like form with surprising and compelling delicacy. Though intimate in scale, the present Spanish Elegy pulses with a fierce gestural dynamism. Rendered in the renounced monochrome palette characteristic of the Elegies, the present work achieves a volatile yet lyrical equilibrium, the heavy blackness of death finding resolution with the airy whiteness of life, and together both culminating in a deeply somber and emotive composition that finds universal resonance far beyond the reaches of the canvas. Speaking to the resounding significance of black and white in his Elegy paintings, Motherwell said: “After a period of painting [the Elegies], I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.” (William S. Lieberman, Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, An American Choice: the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman collects ion, 1981, p. 82)

Despite the Elegy series' historically specific allusion to the Spanish Civil War and despite their perceived visual associations with bodies, fruit, phalluses, or even calligraphy, these compositions ultimately evade any specific associations or signifiers in the natural world and instead embody and engender an emotional state, standing as pillars of loss and resilience. Indeed, Motherwell further understood the tragedy of the Spanish Republic as a representation of the idea of tragedy in our t.mes and as a metaphor for all injustice. As scholar Jack Flam explains: Motherwell “wanted to create an art that would deal with the universal rather than the specific, yet be charged with intuitive feeling; that would be true to its medium, be quintessentially what it was physically, yet also evoke powerful reverberations beyond its mere physical appearance.” (Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, and Tim Clifford, Motherwell: 100 Years, New York, 2015, p. 25) Unencumbered by figuration, Spanish Elegy communicates feeling through the universal language of gesture. There is a palpable physicality to the present work; viewers can sense the movement of paint across its surface—its flicks, its accumulations, and its layering.

Motherwell’s Elegy paintings collects ively stand today as amongst the most psychologically complex and visually stimulating of the Twentieth Century, undoubtedly represent the crowning achievement of Motherwell’s highly lauded oeuvre. At once lyrical and unruly, meditative and demanding, Spanish Elegy is a painting of profound resilience and enduring resonance.

Artist

Robert Motherwell