A monument of profound resilience and enduring resonance, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 130 from 1974-75 stands at the pinnacle of Robert Motherwell’s Elegies, his most acclaimed and extensive body of work. Teeming with tremendous emotional and painterly force, the present work testifies to the genius of the artist both as an icon of the Abstract Expressionist movement and keen theoretician of the human experience.
“An elegy is a form of mourning, not a call to action, but symbolization of grief, lyrical in the sense of an outpouring, black in the sense of death, just as white, which contains all colors, represents life.”
Intended as a lamentation or funeral song after the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are a lyrical and poetic memorial to the tremendous atrocities suffered by the Spanish people during dictator Francisco Franco’s fascist regime. Later reflecting 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), a twenty-one-year-old Motherwell became inspired to visually eulogize the tragedy from a fiery speech by André Malraux at an anti-war rally on the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Motherwell crafted his first Elegy in 1948 as a pen and ink drawing intended to be published with a poem by Harold Rosenberg, and the raw emotional power of this theme spurred him to develop nearly 140 works in this series until his death in 1991. 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 statements. 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). Executed during Motherwell’s active protest of the Vietnam War, the present work embodies Motherwell’s understanding of this series as a representation of all global injustice.
Motherwell’s Elegies in Context: Meditations on the Spanish Civil War
Explosively confrontational in its forceful presence, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 130 belongs to a grouping of eight large-scale Elegy paintings that were conceived as two groupings of four elegies in varied palettes, intended to interrogate varied spatial possibilities within the Elegies series. The alternating black ovoid and rectilinear shapes of the present work reverberate across the surface to achieve a volatile yet lyrical equilibrium. This composition revels in the infinite dichotomies of these contrasting geometries that ultimately are an expression of the dialectic nature of life itself, at once comprising vitality and bereavement, life and death. While redolent with figurative allusions, these forms ultimately evade any specific associations or signifiers in the natural world and instead stand as pillars of loss and resilience. The composition of the present work is modeled from that of an earlier and smaller work, Spanish Elegy with Orange No. 5, which also served as the basis for a closely-associated large-scale elegy, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134 (see fig. 1).
Further dampening the overwhelming, architectonic weight of the black forms, the gestural brushwork and roughly painted edges, born from his collage practice, imbue the weighty composition with a sense of movement and expressionistic vigor. With such near-tangible energy, Motherwell affirms art’s cathartic role in humanity’s confrontation with the harsh realities of the modern era. As H. H. Arnason expounds, “Despite the high degree of sophistication evident in Motherwell’s work, the overriding effect of many of them is that of primitive force, something atavistic in the most highly urbanized of modern man…The Elegies have always been concerned with the expression of this element of the savage in the human soul. However, in most of these the suggestion of the barbaric has been held in control by the architectural structure of the forms, as in mankind it is held in control by the social suppression of civilization” (H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 63).
In Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 130, the heavy blackness of death finds resolution within the airy whiteness of life. Speaking to the resounding import of color in his Elegy paintings, Motherwell noted, “An elegy is a form of mourning, not a call to action, but symbolization of grief, lyrical in the sense of an outpouring, black in the sense of death, just as white, which contains all colors, represents life” (Robert Motherwell, A Personal Recollection, 1986). Anchored by the earthy tones that diffuse the otherwise glaring contrast between black and white that characterizes many of the Elegies, the present work is punctuated by flashes of red, blue and white that invoke Motherwell’s superlative skills as a colorist. Motherwell’s cogent graphic sensibility and sophisticated palette here culminate in a deeply and emotive composition that finds universal resonance far beyond the reaches of the canvas.
Motherwell’s Elegies liberated his oeuvre, allowing him to engage in an abstract mode that nevertheless referenced concepts and ontological metaphysics, rendering his ultimate subject the very nature of existence. The artist noted: “They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contract between life and death and their interrelation” (Robert Motherwell, “A Conversation at Lunch”: Address delivered at Smith College, January 1963). This output placed Motherwell in the company of the philosophers, poets, painters and social critics who were his friends and fellows in seeking to use abstraction and poetic symbolism to convey the inexorable cycle of life and death (see fig. 2).
Despite the exhaustiveness of his investigation into this iconic abstract motif, Motherwell seldom embarked on a scale as monumental and commanding as the present work: the artist executed under forty monumental Elegy paintings over the course of these four decades, over two-thirds of which are in permanent museum collections internationally. The present work is part of a limited suite of seven Elegy paintings executed between 1974 and 1975 that measure a staggering 96 by 120 inches, other examples of which belong to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, Tate Gallery, London, Detroit Institute of Arts and the Pinakotheken, Munich (see figs. 3-5). A feat of human expression, the present work testifies to the revolutionary contribution of Motherwell’s Elegies to the art historical canon.
Fig. 4 Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #131, 1974, Detroit Institute of Arts. © 2023 DEDALUS FOUNDATION, INC. / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY
Fig. 5 Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 133, 1975, Pinakotheken, Munich. © 2023 DEDALUS FOUNDATION, INC. / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY