(lively music playing) Voiceover: We're at SFMOMA, and we're looking at a
large Robert Motherwell, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57," and it was made in 1957, finished in 1960. Voiceover: And there are a whole lot of
Motherwells that look a lot like this and that are about the same subject, and it's a series that he did
that occupied most of his life. Voiceover: That's right. He made over 140 canvases. The very first one is very small. It was done on an 8-1/2×11
sheet of paper in ink. It was meant to illustrate a poem
written by his friend and colleague, Harold Rosenberg, the art critic. Rosenberg and Motherwell, this
is a decade earlier now in 1948, were co-editing an artist
magazine called "Possibilities." There was only one issue, however, and this never made it into
that ill-fated second issue. Voiceover: So these forms, these
hanging suspended oval forms, the horizontal rectangular shapes that
don't ever quite touch the bottom, the painterly quality around
the edges of the forms, it being hard to tell whether the white
paint is in front of the black paint or vice versa, these are things that we
see in this entire series. There is something about these shapes and the way that they were painted and the black and white that
suggested for Motherwell something about fascism and the
Spanish Republic and Franco. Voiceover: All issues relating
to the Spanish Civil War and the loss of democracy, this opening gambit of what
would become the violence of the Second World War. Motherwell was seeking
an abstract language that could embody his humanist feelings and his deep sense of loss
and mourning and elegy for the tragedies that
had taken place in Europe. Voiceover: And many artists were involved
in the Spanish Civil War, and writers. That's right. A lot of Americans and other
Europeans were deeply sympathetic to the democratic ideals of the Republic. Voiceover: And so it's hard to know
what these forms meant to him precisely, but it's not hard to feel a
brooding sense of entrapment when standing in front of the canvas. Voiceover: That paint can
also be emotionally direct is absolutely appropriate for
Motherwell's ideas at this time. Motherwell was a painter,
but he was also a critic and interested in
philosophy and literature. He is actually referencing
not only that original poem that this motif was intended
originally to illustrate, but then he quotes the
great Spanish poet Lorca in the first in this series, which is, "At Five in the Afternoon." Voiceover: That poem by Rosenberg
that this motif originally illustrated had a feeling of sadism. Voiceover: And suffering. Voiceover: And suffering. And so that becomes transferred to this
idea of looking at the Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War. Voiceover: It's hard to look at
this canvas, for me at least, and not feel the profound
loss and violence and Motherwell's need to find an idiom, a visual language that can
convey it that is solemn enough. Perhaps the figurative
tradition feels inadequate. Voiceover: And let's not forget,
at this moment in history, Franco is still ruling Spain. Fascism is still very much alive. Voiceover: When this is being painted, "Guernica" by Picasso, which
Motherwell was thinking about, that painting that is
blacks and whites and grays. Voiceover: And that expresses
the horrors of a specific moment in the Spanish Civil War. Voiceover: That's right. Remember, it was at MoMA because
Picasso wouldn't let it go back to Spain so long as Franco was in power. So these were still real issues. Voiceover: So speaking to that violence that had been so prevalent
for so long in Europe and trying to find a new
kind of pictorial language. Voiceover: This is an
artist that we associate with this great American school of
painting, Abstract Expressionism. But Motherwell reminds us that abstract
expressionism is tied to Europe and that its concerns
are not purely American. (lively piano music)