Robert Motherwell Art

Robert Motherwell Elegy Sketch 1980-ca. 1984 Acrylic on canvas board 15 x 29.5 cms (5 7/8 x 11 5/8 ins) RM-P80-2500 P1008 An early version of this work was photographed in 1980 (Sloman photo no. 1217). Studio photographs show that Motherwell modified the black forms and added the white lines sometime around 1984, without changing the overall composition. Exhibited: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Robert Motherwell, 1984, no. 106. Manny Silverman Gallery...

Robert Motherwell Shem the Penman #18 1983 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 25.4 x 35.5 cms (10 x 13 3/4 ins) RM10044 P1068 Signed upper left and on reverse. Provenance: Dedalus Foun...

Robert Motherwell Open Untitled (Yellow) 1981 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 30.5 x 40.6 cms (12 x 16 ins) RM10045 P1019 Recto upper left: RM Verso not signed,not dated Artist's stu...

Robert Motherwell Shem the Penman #19 1983 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 25.4 x 35.6 cms (10 x 14 ins) RM13642 P1069 Recto, upper left: RM Verso: R. Motherwell \ 1983 Verso (on b...

Robert Motherwell The Studio 1987 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 152.4 x 182.9 cms (60 x 72 ins) RM13966 P1140 When Motherwell made The Studio, in 1987, he was nearing the end of an...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163 1979-82 Acrylic and Conte crayon on board 59.1 x 74.3 cms (23 1/4 x 29 1/4 ins) RM14159 P1061 Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163 is a fine example of Robert Motherwell’s most acclaimed body of work, the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. As important as Barnett Newman’s zips and Jackson Pollock’s drips for their revolutionary contribution to art history, the Elegies are Motherwell’s most extensive series; he executed over 140 paintings using this motif, beginning in 1948 until his death in 1991. Nearly every major museum collection, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have in their permanent collection an Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Intended to be read as a lamentation or funeral song after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are a lyrical and poetic memorial to the immense human loss and suffering endured during these harrowing years. Motherwell was a young student of twenty-one when the horrors of the Spanish Civil War commenced in 1936, and he would later reflect that it was the most “moving political event” of his youth. In 1939, the Spanish Civil War concluded with the fall of Spain’s democratically elected socialist government, which was deposed by a fascist coalition led by dictator Francisco Franco, whose dictatorship would persist until 1975. In 1948 nearly a decade after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell created his first Elegy with a small drawing to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg. Over the next four decades, Motherwell would pursue this same structural and thematic motif relentlessly; taken as a whole, the Elegies confirm the resounding impact that this war had on the young artist, and indeed stand as a powerful monument to the overwhelming loss during and in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell stated: “I meant the word 'elegy' in the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began…The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should not be forgotten, even though la guerre est finie.” (David Craven in Joan M...

Robert Motherwell Homage to Catalonia 1985 Acrylic on canvas 61 x 91.4 cms (24 x 36 ins) RM14749 P1116 This painting was begun in 1985 as a work from the Hollow Men series. By 1986 ...

America-La France Variations IV 1984. Lithograph in colors with collage on Tyler Graphics Ltd. handmade paper. Signed in pencil Numbered 17/68 (there were also XVIII artist’s proofs ...

America-La France Variations I 1983-4. Lithograph in colors with collage on Tyler Graphics Ltd. handmade paper. Signed in pencil Numbered 46/70 (there were also XVIII artist’s proofs...

TECHNICAL INFORMATION: Red Samurai, from Octavio Paz suite 1987-88 Lithograph and linoleum cut in colors with chine appliqué on handmade Japanese Masa Dos...

An aquatint etching out of 1988 in a very good condition and bright colours. 57 x 66 cm. Edition of 90, signed and numbered.

Robert Motherwell's "The Red and Black No.52" is an abstract collage that incorporates oil based etching ink, pasted papers, and aquatint on paper. The piece was created between the ...