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)

1957-J-No. 2, (1957)

Clyfford Still

December 29, 2011: That time a drunk girl punched this painting (estimated worth — $30-40 million), shoved her butt on it and peed herself. Oh and also caused approx. $10 000 in damages..

La roue / The Wheel (Cold Dog - Indian Summer), 1954-5

Jean-Paul Riopelle

Chamonix, (approx. 1962)

Joan Mitchell

The Tree, (1964)

Agnes Martin

“When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.”

Rothko Chapel B-sides on view at the Menil Collection in Houston.

[paintings by Mark Rothko, c. 1964-7]

Here II, (1965)

Barnett Newman

Tocsin, (1953)

Jean-Paul Riopelle