The
youngest member of the group of artists who founded the Abstract Expressionist
movement in New York in the 1940s, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was
also an active writer and editor of writings on art, and was greatly
influenced by poetry, philosophy (which he studied at Stanford University)
and, in the case of his Spanish Elegyseries, politics. Though a relatively
small part of Motherwell's total output, the Spanish Elegiesare the
best known works of Motherwell's career and constitute one of the most
poignant meditations of modern art on a political theme since Picasso's
Guernica.
The origin
of imagery for the Spanish Elegies is in Motherwell's 1948 black-and-white
illustration for a poem by Harold Rosenberg in the avant-garde
periodical, Possibilities. After many experiments in these abstract
illuminations, the pattern emerged of black vertical and oval shapes
against a white backdrop. These forms were reworked over the years
until
they were painted in monumental scale in the late 1950s, a time of
prolific and brilliant activity in Motherwell's career. In his essay "for Robert
Motherwell, New and Revised," H. H. Arnason describes the "renewal of
the Elegies and the general expansion of creative effort in the late
1950s and early 1960s . . . a period when any self-doubts seem to have
been resolved, and the artist was moving into a prolific and brilliant
phase of his mature achievements . . . He suddenly seemed to have realized
that he was in control of forms capable of almost infinitely monumental
expression." This period of dynamic creative expression resulted in
the large scale, rough-textured quality and architectural framework
of a number of Spanish Elegy paintings, including No. 57. This painting
in particular places the action of the painting within a unique spatial
enclosure.
While
the Elegies represent the central chapter in Motherwell's work,
they
stand out from other work in his oeuvre by the almost exclusive use
of back and white, in contrast to the richer palette of his other
paintings
and collages. They are also distinctive in the artist's concentrated
focus on a single theme—the destruction of Spanish democracy by
Franco—in opposition to the range of experimentation and change
that characterized most of Motherwell's career. No other single theme
so preoccupied Motherwell as did the Spanish Elegies.
The
Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 57 was purchased from the artist
by its most recent owner, Gardiner Hempel, a Bay Area collector, in
1961 and remained in his collection until he made it available to SFMOMA
as a fractional gift and extended loan in 1993 in honor of the Museum's
late curator of painting and sculpture, John Caldwell. Through the generosity
of Mr. Gardiner and funds from Phyllis Wattis, the painting is now entering
the Museum's collection on a permanent basis. The work was included
in the Robert Motherwell retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in
1965 which traveled internationally, and was showcased in SFMOMA's exhibition,
Preserving a Modern Masterpiece: The Conservation of a Motherwell Elegy,
in 1993. It has been a regular part of the Museum's permanent collection
exhibitions since the opening of its current building in 1995, and was
most recently shown in tandem with the Museum's recently acquired Mark
Rothko painting from 1960 and a Clyfford Still painting of the same
year. It joins twenty drawings and four other Motherwell paintings in
the collection.
As is the case with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and
Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell received his first one-person museum
exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
