S otheby’s is honored to offer Robert Motherwell’s Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos) on behalf of Goucher College to support the establishment of an Art Acquisition Fund – a permanent endowment dedicated to the purchase of new artwork by the College. Originally founded in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, as a women’s college in 1885, Goucher College became co-ed in 1985 and has been committed to offering an innovative and exemplary liberal arts education that fosters its graduates to thrive in a diverse, global community. Today, Goucher provides the opportunity for one hundred percent of its students to study abroad in any one of over fifty countries prior to graduation at no additional cost. In line with Goucher’s founding principles, the new Art Acquisition Fund will involve the participation of students in the selection and purchase of a diverse array of works created by artists from around the world – with a particular focus on acquiring works by women and underrepresented artists.

Robert Motherwell’s Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos) captures the artist’s dual role as both an icon of the Abstract Expressionist movement and a keen theoretician of the enduring themes of human nature and freedom. Motherwell painted his first Elegy composition in 1948 to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic I and created over 100 variations on the theme in the coming decades. Intended as a lamentation or meditation on the lives lost during the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are a lyrical and poetic memorial to the immense human loss and suffering endured during those harrowing years. Executed in 1953, Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos) was the first work from this historic series to be given a number, indicating its larger significance within the canon of Elegies, and the profound intentionality taken by the artist in creating this work. The subtitle here, Palamos, refers to a coastal town in the Catalan province of Girona. Motherwell's practice of including city names in his titles continued throughout the Elegy series, beginning in 1949 with Granada. Although the original title of this painting was forgotten or overlooked by the end of the 1950s and the painting was variously exhibited incorrectly as Spanish Elegy XXV-B, the present title more accurately reflects its place among the Elegy paintings. Charged with an arresting immediacy, the intimate scale of the present work embodies the same majesty and mastery of Motherwell’s larger scale works from this period, pulsing with a fierce gestural dynamism that characterizes the artist’s celebrated and pioneering approach to abstraction.

Rendered in the 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, together culminating in a deeply somber and emotive composition that finds universal resonance far beyond the reaches of the canvas. Motherwell's rhythmic application of luscious white impasto draws attention to the physical and textural qualities of the surface if the work, which is in many ways evocative of Robert Ryman's later treatment of white as a medium in itself, one that is replete with a modulating texture, density and lightness.

Unencumbered by figuration, Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos) 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 through flicks, accumulations, and layering. 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)

Motherwell’s Elegy paintings collects ively stand today amongst the most psychologically complex and visually stimulating of the twentieth century and undoubtedly represent the crowning achievement of Motherwell’s highly lauded oeuvre. At once personal and universal Spanish Elegy XIV (Palamos) is a painting of profound resilience and enduring resonance.

Artist

Robert Motherwell