Iberia No. II, (1958)

Robert Motherwell

“I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world. Though sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my unconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it. In Iberia or Spanish Painting, for example, you would have to know that a Spanish bull ring is made of sand of an ochre color, and that Spanish bulls are very small, quick, and coal black. Both of those coal black, ochre pictures have a bull in them, but you cannot really see the bull. They are an equivalence of the ferocity of the whole encounter.”

— Robert Motherwell (via: Tate)

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 57, (1957-60)

Robert Motherwell

Untitled (Ultramarine), 1974

Robert Motherwell

lithoshop:

Robert Motherwell at Tyler Graphics watching a proof being pulled, 1982.

‘Elegy’ Study, (1949)

Robert Motherwell

“ Main Street is the creation of banks, supermarkets and drugstores; museums are the creation of art historians, object-collectors, tax-deductors (what a bargain-basement is the Chrysler Museum in Provincetown!) and assorted dilettantes and functionaries. No wonder museums exist apart from one’s real self, impersonal, remote, everything reduced to rows of objects, whether you are an artist, art lover, student or child. In the end, one experiences nothing of art from the history of objects. The issue is passion, whether quiet or wild. Museums distort the history of artistic passion, just as do the societies which museums reflect. For passion is only recognized by the passionate. The rest is object, a false history of art and artists. ”
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Robert Motherwell

[via: The Writings of Robert Motherwell (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), e. Dore Ashton with Joan Banach, p. 2007]

Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV, (1953-4)

Robert Motherwell