Carolina QuotesI take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about. The 'Spanish Elegies' [his most famous series of paintings, related to the Spanish Civil War] are not 'political' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
- work
- after 1970
- year
- 1970
- locator
- p. 111
Cite this record
“I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song …” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-18C40225BE. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/18c40225be
More from Robert Motherwell
In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on...
Compared with Brancusi, Matisse, Miro, I'm a barbarian. If people would understand the barbaric force of my paintings, instead of always pointing out how well I understand Picasso. I'm a Viking who has read French literature.
You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't by oneself.. .It's essential to fracture influences in the same way that free association in psychoanalysis helps to fracture one's social self-deceptions.