17/06/2026
Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic is an iconic series of over 250 monumental abstract paintings and works on paper created between 1947 and his death in 1991. Using a stark black-and-white palette, the works feature suspended ovals and vertical bars that serve as a poetic, mournful meditation on life, death, and human suffering.
Motherwell created the first Elegy work in 1947, not as a painting but as an illustration intended to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg, which was planned for the magazine Possibilities, which only produced one issue. The Rosenberg poem was dark and surreal. Recalling the drawing he made to accompany it, Motherwell said, “We agreed that I would handwrite the poem in my calligraphy and make a drawing or drawings to go with it and it was to be in black and white. So I began to think about getting the brutality and aggression of his poem in some kind of abstract terms.” The drawing he came up with was titled At Five in the Afternoon, a reference to the brutality of the Spanish Civil War.
In 1948, after his first wife left him, Motherwell began drinking heavily and threw himself into his painting. He rediscovered At Five in the Afternoon, the drawing he had done a year before to accompany the Harold Rosenberg poem, and thus decided to begin a new series of paintings based on its black and white palette and distinct arrangement of ovals and lines. Thus the Elegy series of paintings began.
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