Matthew Holman’s new essay on Robert Motherwell traces the artist’s practice of revision as a form of meaning-making — from the Elegy to the Spanish Republic to The Forge (1965–1966 / 1967–1968), a painting commemorating David Smith, to which Motherwell returned multiple times over several years. Drawing on archival correspondence and exhibition histories, Holman argues that Motherwell’s successive reworkings of his canvases were not corrections but acts of sustained confrontation with history, loss, and the limits of abstraction. The essay accompanies the exhibition Robert Motherwell: Surface/Subject, on view at 509 West 27th Street.
— Robert Motherwell, Von der Mehden Recital Hall, William Benton Museum of Art, April 1979
In his essay “Black or White,” written as the preface to the Samuel Kootz Gallery exhibition of the same name in New York in early 1950, Robert Motherwell recounts a story – perhaps factual, but more likely apocryphal – about a captain navigating the Yukon River in winter. The captain, he writes, “painted the snow black in the path of his ships for twenty-nine miles; the black strip melted three weeks in advance of spring, and he was able to reach clear water. Black does not reflect, but absorbs all light; that is its essential nature; while that of white is to reflect all light.”[2] By darkening the surface, the captain does not mechanically remove an obstacle or circumvent his route; he alters the behavior of light, setting in motion a transformation already latent in the landscape. The story reflects Motherwell’s own understanding of pictorial form. Black, the color produced by the absorption of light and opposed to white’s reflectivity, is not merely a visual contrast but an operative force, capable of shaping – and being shaped by – the surrounding field. As with the captain’s darkened path on the thawed river, the paintings in the present exhibition, through Motherwell’s treatment of surface and subject over successive interventions, and his applied understanding of form and content, do not so much represent an opening as create one.
The artist’s recurring schema – juxtapositions of rectangular and curvilinear forms, stains, arcing marks, enveloping blacks, and torn paper – do not represent external subjects but acknowledge the latent potential of their loss. Above all, his pictures generate meaning through relations internal to the work: not only through serial repetition and revision (experienced in the way that we recognize familial resemblances while never mistaking a close friend for their sibling), and through the layered material values that his intensely reworked practice of abstraction confers upon paint itself. As Frank O’Hara put it, writing in his introduction to Motherwell’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1965: “While the other protesting artistic voices of the time were bound by figuration and overt symbolism, the abstract expressionists chose the open road of personal responsibility, naked nerve-ends and possible hubris.”[3] As such, Motherwell was fond of a thought experiment imagining a naturalistic representation of the Battle of Gettysburg (or, say, the Final Offensive on Madrid in March 1939). To paint it faithfully would require recording every soldier, shot, sound, and sensation; if fully achieved, the result would simply duplicate reality. Such completeness is impossible, and strict naturalism ultimately aims at reproducing the world rather than confronting it. For Motherwell, artists must deal from first principles – with ideas rather than events. “What distinguishes, among other things, man from the beasts,” he believed, “is this capacity for abstraction.”[4]
In Untitled (Elegy) (1975), as in many of the works that make up the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, the heavy black masses and splayed ovals appear so densely weighted that they visually overwhelm the vertical bands of white, grey, and ochre (Motherwell’s symbol for “the earth”) beneath, as though expanding eastward across the surface.[5] “The Spanish ‘Elegies’ are an effort to symbolize a subjective image of modern Spain,” Motherwell said in 1950, two years after he had created the first work in the series: “They are all in black and white: they are funeral pictures, […] dirges, elegies – barbaric and austere.”[6] In this way, these works are entirely consistent with the ambitions of a poem of serious reflection, a form which might today to be associated with a specific lament for a person, as in the case of “García Lorca in his Lament for a bullfighter [Ignacio Sánchez Mejías],” the spur for Motherwell’s first Elegy, or “in the traditional sense that John Milton would understand” (as in the 1637 pastoral elegy Lycidas, written by Miltonfor his friend, Edward King, who drowned off the Welsh coast at the age of 25).[7] “An elegy is a form of mourning, not a call to action, but a symbolization of grief,” Motherwell reflected, “lyrical in the sense of an outpouring, black in the sense of death, just as white, which contains all colors, represents life.”[8] Motherwell resisted interpreting the Spanish Civil War as a simple moral opposition of good and evil, yet the Elegies function as acts of mourning. Rather than commemorating a discrete historical event, they stage the melancholia produced by the Falangist victory and the consolidation of fascism – a moment that marked, once again, the collapse of twentieth-century progressive hopes. Black and white did not represent those two forces per se, but served as what he referred to as “the protagonists” for the drama. [9]
What, then, can be elegiac about the Elegies themselves? What does the word elegy do to our understanding of the composition? How was the series seen in relation to the legacies of the Republican cause during the post-Pact of Madrid period, when the United States brought Franco in from the cold as a new ally in the fight against communism? [10] A historical case in point proves instructive here. During the display of The New American Painting exhibition in Madrid in 1958, Spanish authorities refused to exhibit Elegy for the Spanish Republic XXXV (1954–58), now held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unless Motherwell altered the title, which he refused to do, resulting in his becoming what he characterized as “persona non grata.” [11] The episode strengthened his ties with Spanish painters such as Antoni Tàpies and Antonio Saura, who protested the work’s exclusion, even though it deeply disturbed Porter McCray, who ran MoMA’s International Program from New York. McCray described the “Motherwell situation” as “a very unpleasant experience,” [12] and feared that Motherwell might “raise Hell in Madrid” and so put the whole exhibition in jeopardy. [13] O’Hara, who was assisting with the installation, saw it more from the side of the artist and insisted that if the painting were to be shown it “should remain exactly as is,” since doing otherwise would set “a very dangerous precedent” and threaten both curatorial independence and the work’s integrity as the artist intended it. [14] The controversy showed that the title was inseparable from the work’s meaning – not merely a label, but a claim that abstraction could bear moral weight, especially in a nation still divided over what had been lost and what deserved mourning.
In his retrospective introduction, O’Hara was quick to stress Motherwell’s internationalism: “The first foreign political event to engage [Motherwell’s] feelings was the Spanish Civil War, that perfect mirror of all that was confused, venal and wrong in national and international politics and has remained so.”[15] Several of the paintings in the present exhibition respond to Motherwell’s internationalism and his affinity with Spain, including Untitled (Iberia) (1963) and Spanish Frontier (ca. 1964). Motherwell started his Iberia series on his first visit to Spain in 1958, during his honeymoon with Helen Frankenthaler, and “a generation after the Civil War.”[16] The Iberia series was inspired, at least in part, by their visits to the Altamira and Lascaux caves, where they saw prehistoric depictions of aurochs (long-horned prehistoric bulls) on the walls, and a particularly visceral visit to the bullfighting ring where Frankenthaler was horrified by the violence. Less monumental and less architectonic than the Elegies, and more fluid in touch and color, they rely on what the artist admired in Rafael Alberti’s definition of the “Spanish black.”[17] After a four-year absence, Motherwell returned to the Iberia motif in 1963, taking it up again with unusual decisiveness. Untitled (Iberia) stands as the largest example of that series from the mid-1960s and, significantly, the only one from this moment that he chose to date directly on the canvas.[18] “The alternative to faith is a black void!” Motherwell once exclaimed: “Sometimes that beautiful white virgin canvas that I begin with, after countless transformations, ends up nearly wholly black.”[19]
If Untitled (Iberia) appears almost entirely black, save for a small zone of white in the lower-left ground, then Spanish Frontier appears as its mirror: the picture plane, clearly worked and reworked, with visible accumulations of impasto on the surface, features a compact area of white on the lower-right. Similarly, Bull No. 4 (1958), which he started in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, engages material blackness directly. “The chemistry of the pigments is interesting,” Motherwell had earlier reflected, observing that the materials’ passage from world to studio shaped the decisions he made before the canvas. Since black pigments often come from charred bones or horns, Motherwell once wrote that he wondered “what animal’s bones (or horns) are making the furrows of [his] picture.”[20] This remark links material substance to motif: the bull is not depicted but, perhaps, materially present in the pigment itself, an echo of the corrida that haunted both Spanish culture and the Elegies.
In Spanish Painting with the Face of a Dog (1958/59/60), also first conceived in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Motherwell worked on bed linen, since artists’ canvas was not readily available. In a postcard to O’Hara, Frankenthaler joked about the controversy over the titles of Motherwell’s pictures and that they might be “lynched” at the Madrid opening, adding it was more likely they would be expelled from the Ritz for painting all night in the rooms.[21] Even as political controversy raged in Madrid, Frankenthaler’s ironic remark underscores how inseparable the Saint-Jean-de-Luz paintings were from the artists’ lived experience as their studio practice, and close working quarters, shaped Motherwell’s approach to process. During this period, as Katy Rogers argues, Motherwell “admired the way in which Frankenthaler let the paint on her canvases flow freely, with virtually no revision, with relatively little drawing, and with little distinction between figure and ground.”[22] Viewing those paintings made in Saint-Jean-de-Luz head-on introduces a key question: how can painterly decisions like removal, revision, and the buildup of paint be detected once the work is complete? Unlike other Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning or Joan Mitchell – whose vigorous strokes and remnants of earlier marks are often easy to see – Motherwell rarely foregrounds gestural traces. Instead, the changes he makes tend to be integrated into the final structure, so they merge with the final picture rather than announcing themselves as visible gestures.
A similar dissolution of figure and ground appears in Spanish Painting with the Face of a Dog, although the work developed through several distinct phases and was even publicly exhibited before being radically reworked in the studio. An early black-and-white photograph from its presentation in the Annual Exhibition: Sculpture, Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 1958 shows a bulbous form hovering in the upper right, supported by a Y-shaped plinth of pale ochre. The title invites comparison with the suspended head of a dog apparently lost at sea in Francisco Goya’s haunting Perro semihundido (c. 1819–1823): a face that never stabilizes as an image but wavers between apparition and erasure, persisting only as abstraction. Motherwell had seen Goya’s Black Paintings, of which El Perro is probably the best-known, at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, in June of 1958, and he admired the Spanish artist for playing down colors “in favor of gray and black,” resulting in “a somber symbolization of reality for which I have always felt a shock of recognition.”[23] At the Whitney, Motherwell’s rectangular painting still showed a small patch of the white underlayer at the extreme upper left, untouched by the deep black paint that dominates the rest of the composition. By 1959, the corner highlight had been painted over; by the 1965 MoMA retrospective, even the bulbous form had disappeared. What remains is a progressive blackening of the canvas through successive overpainting. “Black is the deepest of colours,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1951: “We say ‘deep black’ but not ‘deep white.’”[24]
A similar process of revision governs The Forge (1965–1966/1967–1968). An earlier state appeared in Two Decades of American Painting at MoMA (1966–67); after it was returned to him, Motherwell substantially revised it. Writing to Tate curator Ronald Alley in 1970, he explained its elegiac character: the painting commemorates his friend, the sculptor David Smith, who was killed in a car accident in 1965. Smith’s own “forgings” refer to an experimental period in his career when, a decade earlier, he created eleven sculptures in an active industrial factory in Bloomington, Indiana, using power-driven machinery. Smith hammered plugs into hot steel so that the metal splayed outward, producing a reductive, vertical, often blackened sculptural line in space. Like Smith, who referred to his method of production in the title, with its doubled meaning as the creation of something enduring or successful, Motherwell’s revisions parallel Smith’s process. The changes to The Forge are not merely compositional adjustments but the accumulation of repeated engagements with the canvas, each addition settling over the residue of prior decisions. The surface behaves like forged metal. Black passages spread across the canvas yet feel compacted, as if driven into the fabric rather than laid upon it, giving the finished work the firmness of steel. It leaves the viewer with an unanswerable question: might these revisions mark an elegiac desire to recover, and even remake, what had been lost?
“Pictures no more than poems change anything,” Motherwell reflected: “But they can represent that freedom of choice without censorship so precious to the human spirit and its integrity.” [25] Across these works, revision is not correction. Rather, it becomes a part of Motherwell’s subject. The (near-but-not-quite-total) blackening of the canvas, the lyrical significance and intricacies of meaning in the titles, the reluctance or the refusal to finalize an image, and the persistence of serial form all hold open a work in time. The Elegies mourn not only the Republican defeat but the impossibility of resolving history into a finished picture. Each return to a canvas – sometimes years later – acknowledges that meaning emerges retrospectively, like the Yukon captain’s route, navigable only weeks afterward. For Motherwell, abstraction was therefore not an escape from history, whether personal or political, but a way of confronting its persistence without illustration. The same question spans the painted surface, the thawing river, and, as he put it: One’s sense of life.
[1] Robert Motherwell, “Black or White,” in Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists, exhibition catalogue (New York: Samuel Kootz Gallery, 1950), n.p. Reprinted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p. 86.
[2] Robert Motherwell, “Excerpts from a Public Lecture and a Conversation with Students” (transcript of a lecture and discussion with students at Von der Mehden Recital Hall, William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, April 5-6, 1979), in Robert Motherwell & Black, exhibition catalogue, compiled by Stephanie Terenzio, edited by Hildegard Cummings (Storrs, CT: William Benton Museum of Art, 1980): 125-31, 134, 140, 142-47; p. 128.
[3] Frank O’Hara, “Introduction,” in Robert Motherwell: With Selections from the Artist’s Writings (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965), p. 10.
[4] Robert Motherwell, “On the Humanism of Abstraction; The Artist Speaks”, in Robert Motherwell at St. Paul’s School, exhibition catalogue (Concord, N.H.: St. Paul’s School, 1970), 5-14, p. 5. Reprinted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 250-255, p. 250.
[5] Robert Motherwell, “A Conversation at Lunch,” (based on notes by Margaret Paul, November 1962), An Exhibition of the Work of Robert Motherwell, exhibition catalogue(Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass., 1953), n.p.
[6] Robert Motherwell, in Motherwell: First Exhibition of Paintings in Three Years, exhibition catalogue(New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, 1950), n.p.
[7] Robert Motherwell, “A Personal Recollection,” a paper prepared for a symposium titled “The Effects of the Spanish Civil War on Arts and Letters in Spain and the United States of America,” at the Spanish Institute, New York, October 25, 1986. Reprinted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 346-350, p. 348.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Motherwell, “A Conversation at Lunch,” n.p.
[10] It is worth noting that General Francisco Franco died the same year as Motherwell made Untitled (Elegy). Franco’s death and the end of the dictatorship was the condition that Pablo Picasso gave for the return of Guernica (1937), his own lament for the Spanish Civil War, to be returned to Spain.
[11] Robert Motherwell, “A Personal Recollection,” p. 349.
[12] Porter McCray, letter to Luis González Robles, Parkhotel Rotterdam, 6 August 1958, I.A.718, International Council and International Program Files, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
[13] Porter McCray, letter to René d’Harnoncourt, Geneva, 9 August 1958, I.A.718, International Council and International Program Files, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
[14] Frank O’Hara, letter to Susan Senior, 9 June 1958, I.A.718, International Council and International Program Files, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
[15] O’Hara, “Introduction,” Robert Motherwell, p. 9.
[16] Robert Motherwell, “A Personal Recollection,” p. 349.
[17] See Mary Ann Caws, Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), pp. 151-152.
[18] Although another Iberia from the 1960s, Iberia No. 23, bears the date 1964 on the verso, that inscription refers to an earlier composition beneath the surface and not to the Iberia image itself, which was not composed until 1969. See P517, Iberia No. 23, “Paintings on Canvas and Panel”, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collage: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991. Volume Two, edited by Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, and Tim Clifford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 281.
[19] Robert Motherwell, “A Process of Painting,” lecture presented at the Eight Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, New York, October 5, 1963, and later published in “The Creative Use of the Unconscious by the Artist and by the Psychotherapist,” edited by Jules Barron and Renée Nell, Annals of Psychotherapy (Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapy) 5, no. 1 (1964): pp. 47–49.
[20] Motherwell, “Black or White,” n.p.
[21] Helen Frankenthaler, transcription of a postcard to Frank O’Hara, 23 June 1958, I.A.785, International Council and International Program Papers, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. See Matthew Holman, Frank O’Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), p.129.
[22] Katy Rogers, “Motherwell at Work,” in Motherwell: 100 Years (Milan: Skira, 2015): 213-255, p. 235.
[23] Robert Motherwell, “A Personal Recollection,” p. 348.
