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Robert Motherwell American
Not on view
Beginning about 1948, Motherwell began making oil sketches and paintings that evolved into a series of more than one hundred variations on a theme he called Elegies to the Spanish Republic. Initially inspired by the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and contemporary poetry, his Elegies constitute an extended abstract meditation on life and death. Throughout the series, horizontal white canvases are divided rhythmically by two or three freely drawn vertical bars and punctuated at various intervals by ovoid forms. The paintings are most often composed entirely of black and white—the colors of mourning and radiance, death and life. Motherwell remarked on the entanglement of those forces as a metaphor for his understanding of the experience of being alive.
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Artwork Details
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Title: Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70
Artist: Robert Motherwell (American, Aberdeen, Washington 1915–1991 Provincetown, Massachusetts)
Date: 1961
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 69 x 114 in. (175.3 x 289.6 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Anonymous Gift, 1965
Accession Number: 65.247
Rights and Reproduction: © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Learn more about this artwork
Timeline of Art History
Essay
Abstract Expressionism
Chronology
The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.-present
Museum Publications
Twentieth-Century Art: Selections from the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2, Painting, 1945–1985
Modern and Contemporary Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art = Discovering Infinite Connections in Art History
"The Abstract Expressionists"
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Robert Motherwell (American, Aberdeen, Washington 1915–1991 Provincetown, Massachusetts)
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Vivo (Sepia)
Robert Motherwell (American, Aberdeen, Washington 1915–1991 Provincetown, Massachusetts)
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Dedication–Lincoln Center Oct. 26, 1969. Julliard School
Robert Motherwell (American, Aberdeen, Washington 1915–1991 Provincetown, Massachusetts)
1969
Untitled
Robert Motherwell (American, Aberdeen, Washington 1915–1991 Provincetown, Massachusetts)
1966
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