modern & contemporary art

Elegy to the Spanish Republic #172 (with Blood), Robert Motherwell

In 1994, the Denver Art Museum acquired twenty paintings, drawings, and collages from Robert Motherwell’s estate.

A leading abstract expressionist painter, Motherwell retained much of his work so that, after his death, important regional museums could purchase significant objects at a fraction of their appraised value. The magnificent painting seen here is the last of Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish Republic, a series he began in 1948.

“The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation,” Motherwell wrote. “The Spanish Elegies…are my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot.”

Architecture, Design & Graphics