particular style; rather it refers to an association of artists
who took individual routes to convey emotion through
color, grand gestures, sensuous applications of paint,
and large-scale works.
Motherwell is celebrated for his rugged gestural paintings,
his inscrutable series Elegy to a Spanish Republic, his
painterly Open series, and his lyrical collages. Some
experts explain the images in the Elegy series, those large
black oblong and oval
shapes strung across
canvases as much as
ten feet wide, as simply
architectural.
Others
see them as phalluses
and testicles. Because
of the word ���Spanish���
in the title, these works
are often construed as
a memorial to the losses
in the Spanish Civil
War, to the battle in the
bullfighting ring, or to
death. Black dominates
the
paintings,
and
Motherwell told me
he saw black as ���one
of the most beautiful
Robert Motherwell
colors, the way I think Old Man of The Sea
HYLAND
