The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Motherwell · acrylic with graphite and charcoal on canvas · a broad horizontal at wall scale, over two metres high and near three wide · a slow frieze of black ovals and upright slabs across a light ground, the black laid in wide flat areas with ragged, brushed edges, the drawing in graphite and charcoal left visible in and around the forms · painted in 1971 · one canvas of the Elegies, a series of well over a hundred works begun in 1948 · the unit scored is the single canvas, as it stands; the series is context
Mode
American abstract painting after Abstract Expressionism; a format of the New York School, fixed around 1948 to 1950, carried into 1971 at wall scale
Mythos
The funeral procession and the lament built as a rhythm; black against white as death against life; Spain, the bullring and the defeated republic evoked through the title
Phase
Painted in 1971, twenty-three years into a series the painter began in 1948 and returned to until his death in 1991
Presentation
Acrylic with graphite and charcoal on one broad horizontal canvas, over two metres high and near three wide; two kinds of form, two values and visible drawing
Register
Solemn, slow and heavy; dread held in a sustained procession rather than raised to a climax
Scale
Forms at the height of a body across a field near three metres wide; one canvas among well over a hundred bearing the series’ title
Governing Proposition
Across a light field near three metres wide, black ovals are held between black upright slabs in a slow frieze, the masses as tall as a body, the light pressed out in the intervals between them, the edges ragged where the brush left them, the drawing that found the forms still showing in graphite and charcoal. There is no figure and no story. The wager of the canvas, late in a series its painter began in 1948, is that a public, historical death, the end of a republic, can be mourned by an abstract order of weight and interval alone, and that a format repeated for decades can become a rite of remembrance rather than a signature.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Robert Motherwell painted Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 in 1971, in acrylic with graphite and charcoal on canvas. It is a broad horizontal at wall scale, over two metres high and near three wide. It belongs to the Elegies, a series of well over a hundred works under one title, begun in 1948 and carried on until the painter’s death in 1991. The unit scored is this single canvas, as it stands. The series, its first drawing, its early canvases and its later ones are context and are not scored; what the series did before 1971 is credited to the series, and what No. 110 does is credited to No. 110.
Across a large light field runs a frieze of black forms: ovals and upright slabs, alternating, the ovals held between the uprights as if pressed there. The black is laid in wide flat areas, and its edges are ragged and brushed, never cut. Around the forms and in the ground the drawing that found them, in graphite and charcoal, is left in view. There are two means, black and the light ground, and two kinds of form, the oval and the bar. There is no figure. Nothing is depicted, and yet the title names a political death: the Spanish Republic, defeated in 1939 after the war of 1936 to 1939.
The format is so reduced that each element bears weight. Take away an oval and the alternation of round and upright loses a beat, and the frieze lists. Take away a bar and two ovals press together, and the interval that gives the procession its slowness is gone. The light ground is the other half of the rhythm, and narrowed it would turn a procession into a pattern. What yields is the particular placing. More than a hundred canvases show that these elements can be set otherwise, wider or narrower, with an oval more or fewer, and still be an Elegy. The necessity belongs to the format more than to this arrangement.
Movement II
The edges are where the painting lives. The black does not sit on the ground as a shape cut out and laid down; its contour is brushed and ragged, now firm and now giving, so that the masses breathe against the light. Inside them the brushing keeps the black from going dead, so that it reads as weight and not as fill. The intervals between round and upright are placed across the long field with a calculation that does not show. The range is narrow by design, and much of the canvas’s authority is the authority of a format settled long before; but within that range the making carries the meaning.
The drawing is left in view. Graphite and charcoal show around the forms and in the ground, the trace of a search for where each mass should stand. It is a deliberate record, and it changes what the canvas knows: the mourning is shown being made, not presented finished. The materials are accents on the series’ format, as is the acrylic that took the place of the oil of the early canvases; they do not turn from it.
The form is the knowledge. A procession needs a long field, and the same forms on an upright canvas would stack as a totem rather than move as a cortege. At the size of a hand the ovals would be signs; at the size of a body they are presences, and the viewer stands among them. A depicted funeral would particularise a grief that the canvas holds as general. The elevation comes at first sight, from the scale, from black heavy enough to seem to press and light bright enough to seem pushed aside, and it holds as one sustained note across the width. It does not rise again on looking: it is the grandeur of a wall and a cortege.
Movement III
A viewer who has never heard of the war stands before something heavy, slow and closing. Masses advance in one direction between uprights, and they read as a funeral procession, a frieze of mourners or of coffins; black presses on light as death presses on life. That much the image carries without its title, and it is the oldest elegiac structure there is, a lament made as a rhythm. It shows that grief for a public, historical death can be held by an abstract order, as a structure rather than an illustration.
The rest arrives through the title. The death of a republic and the hopes it carried, Spain itself, the bullring, the elegies of Lorca that stand behind the series: all are named, and none is made particular on the canvas. Much of what the image gives is a mood, solemnity and dread. The painter’s own account of the series, documented in substance, is of a private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgotten. The canvas keeps that insistence as a weight and an interval; the event it insists on is in its name.
Take the two most distant elements, a bar at the edge of the frieze and the broadest oval near its centre, or a black mass and a passage of charcoal line in the ground, and one law holds them: heavy forms of one black, round or upright, pressing on and against a light field in a slow horizontal alternation, the drawing that found them left showing. Nothing breaks it. The law holds across the gap between mass and line. But the territory it governs is small by choice, two forms, two values and one direction.
Movement IV
The turn belongs to the beginning. Around 1948 to 1950, as painting in New York turned to abstraction, the painter set a political defeat inside a nearly emblematic abstract format and carried it in black, which was not yet the established manner. That was a real departure, and it cost something. By 1971 the format was famous, and the painter was also at work on the Open series he had begun in 1967. No. 110 is a return to a proven path, twenty-three years in, made larger and drawn more openly, and its own changes are accents on the format.
Around it the field had moved: Minimal art, colour field painting, the grid, the stripe, the stain and the object. The canvas restates its format with full assurance in that field and reorganises nothing in it. The reach of the Elegies is real, the claim that abstract painting can bear a historical and political subject, which bears on how the New York School is read and stands behind later abstract memorials of a public death; but it was made by the series before this canvas. Beside Untitled (Black on Grey) (8.0), a late series in which Rothko turned against his own format, No. 110 stands lower, chiefly because it makes no such turn.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its making, its coherence and its survival stand high, and its form is the knowledge of its subject; but the axes of consequence stand low. Its disclosure is real and largely atmospheric, its archetype built in the procession and evoked in the rest, its swerve the series’ and not its own, its reach the series’ too. Guernica (9.1), from the same war, makes the particular event an archetype on the canvas, and marks what an Elegy is not. Angelus Novus (7.7), a small image weighted by history with a public catastrophe, stands a tenth above it, and the Adagio for Strings (7.8), an elegy by slow procession in one material, two tenths above.
Movement V
The canvas is whole: one canvas, with no loss or alteration known. It is shown and reproduced, but continuous public view is not shown here, and the fame of the Elegies belongs in part to other canvases. Acrylic of 1971 is stable; the graphite and the charcoal are delicate passages on an unglazed surface of this size, and that is a general risk rather than a known harm. At fifty-five years its form stands as the painter left it.
The questions the series raises have stayed open for nearly eighty years. Is it elegy or emblem; does abstraction mourn here, or only decorate the name of a defeat? What are the ovals: bodies, the bull’s testicles, stones, heads, holes in the light; and does the refusal to settle it deepen the work or empty it? Is the long return to one format a ritual of remembrance or a signature repeated? The canvas yields on looking, at its edges and in its drawing, but these are the series’ questions more than this canvas’s own. The Symphony No. 3 of Górecki (8.4), a lament that carries a public grief through slow repetition, particularises its grief in its texts where the Elegy leaves it to the title.
The orders it holds are death and mourning, carried by the rhythm; the body, in forms at human scale; and the state, since the elegy is for a republic, carried by the title and by a frieze as solemn as a monument. History, Spain and the politics of a generation are named rather than held. The family, labour, nature, any person, any story and any sacred order beyond the shape of lament are absent. The figure describes the form. Twenty-three years in, the format has become a rite, and the procession still moves one way across the light.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the frieze, the format resists subtraction: it is so reduced that each element bears weight. Take away an oval and the alternation of round and upright loses a beat and the frieze lists. Take away a bar and two ovals press together, and the interval that gives the procession its slowness is lost. The light ground is not background but the other half of the rhythm; narrow it and a procession becomes a pattern. What yields is the particular placing. The series shows that these elements could be set otherwise, at another width, with one oval more or fewer, and still be an Elegy, and well over a hundred canvases are the evidence. Necessity holds for the format more than for this arrangement: one compelling solution among many the painter found.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Something can be stated through the image, and it holds: that grief for a public, historical death can be carried by an abstract order without figure or story; that a lament can be a rhythm of weight and interval, mass pressed between uprights and the light pressed out between the masses. The canvas shows mourning as a structure, not an illustration, and a viewer who knows nothing of Spain stands before something heavy, slow and closing. That is disclosure through image, and it is credited. What holds the axis well short of the gate is that much of what the canvas gives is a mood, solemnity and dread, while the meaning, the death of a republic and the hopes it carried, is supplied by the title and the series’ history more than found in the image.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The elevation is real and of the dreadful, solemn kind. It comes at first sight, from the scale: black masses as tall as a person across a field near three metres wide, so that the viewer faces the procession rather than looks at a picture of it. It comes from the contrast at full strength, the black heavy enough to seem to press, the light bright enough to seem pushed aside. And it comes at the edges, where the brushed, ragged contour gives the masses a living border instead of a cut one. What holds it is that the elevation is one note, sustained across the width rather than rising to repeated summits. No passage lifts beyond the first impression; its grandeur is that of a wall and a cortege, not a transport renewed on looking.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The archetypes are present and in part built. The built part is the procession itself: masses advancing slowly in one direction between uprights read as a funeral cortege, a frieze of mourners or of coffins, and the reading comes from the form, not from allusion; a lament made as a rhythm is the oldest elegiac structure there is. The opposition of black and light as death and life, and the pressure of the one on the other, is built in the same way. What is evoked rather than built: Spain itself, the bullring, the elegies of Lorca that stand behind the series, all of which arrive through the title and the history. The particular, a republic destroyed in 1939, is named, not made particular on the canvas. Myth partly constructed, mostly evoked.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The swerve of the Elegies belongs to their beginning. Around 1948 to 1950, as New York painting turned to abstraction, the painter set a public, historical subject, a political defeat, inside a nearly emblematic abstract format and carried it in black, which was not yet the established manner. That turn was real and cost something. But this is No. 110, painted in 1971, twenty-three years into a format the painter had made famous and returned to again and again: a wager placed on a proven path. Its own departures from the earlier canvases, the scale, the visible drawing in graphite and charcoal, acrylic in place of the oil of the early canvases, are accents on the format, not turns from it. The canvas is scored, not the series, and the axis stands lowest but one.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The horizontal frieze is the knowledge: a procession needs a long field, and a vertical canvas of the same forms would stack them as a totem, not a cortege. The scale is the knowledge: at the size of a hand the ovals are signs, at the size of a body they are presences, and the viewer is placed among the mourners. The absence of figure is the knowledge: a depicted funeral would particularise a grief the canvas holds as general, and lose the claim that abstraction can carry history. The visible drawing is knowledge too: the forms were searched for, and the mourning is shown being made. Held below the top because the form is the series’, fixed before this canvas, and much of what it knows the format knew by 1950.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: fifty-five years for this canvas and nearly eighty for the series have kept questions open. Is the series elegy or emblem: does abstraction mourn here, or only decorate the name of a defeat? What are the ovals: bodies, the bull’s testicles, stones, heads, holes in the light; and does the refusal to settle the question deepen the work or empty it? What does the long return to one format do: is it a ritual of remembrance or a signature repeated? Those questions are live and have a literature. What holds the axis is that the return is to the series more than to No. 110. The canvas yields on looking, at its edges, in its drawing, in the rhythm of its intervals, but the questions it raises are the series’ questions, not its own.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is American abstract painting around 1970: after Abstract Expressionism, beside Minimal art and colour field painting, and beside the painter’s own Open series, begun in 1967. Its intrinsic force is modest. The canvas restates at great scale and with full assurance a format set two decades earlier, and reorganises nothing in a field that had moved to the grid, the stripe, the stain and the object. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series has real reach, the claim that abstract painting can bear a historical and political subject, which bears on the later reading of the New York School and stands behind later abstract memorials of a public death; but that reach belongs to the series and its earlier canvases, not to No. 110, and is credited here little.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at fifty-five years. Form: whole, one canvas, with no loss or alteration known. Presence: the canvas is shown and reproduced; but continuous public view is not shown here, and the series’ fame, which is wide, is presence and not proof, and belongs partly to other canvases. That is charged a little. Fabric: acrylic of 1971 is stable, while the graphite and charcoal are delicate passages on an unglazed surface of this size, and that general risk is charged lightly. The figure sits a tenth under the usual figure for its age: form whole, presence charged a little, fabric charged lightly.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of painting in acrylic and of drawing, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing where it matters. The black is laid in broad areas that read as mass and yet not as fill: the brushing within them keeps them alive. The edges are the craft, ragged and brushed, now firm and now giving, so that the forms breathe against the ground rather than sit cut out on it. The intervals, round against upright across a long field, are calculated without seeming so. The drawing left visible is a deliberate record of the search. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, two kinds of form and two values; much of the work’s authority is the format’s, settled long before; and the judgment of this particular surface is held loosely.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a bar at the edge of the frieze and the broadest oval near its centre; or the black mass and a passage of charcoal line left showing in the ground. They obey one law: heavy forms of one black, round or upright, pressing on and against a light field in a slow horizontal alternation, with the drawing that found them left in view. Nothing contradicts it: there is no second kind of mark, no figure, nothing that breaks the law. The law holds across the gap between mass and line, which is wider than in a pure colour field. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is small by choice, two forms, two values, one direction. The figure credits a law kept without fault and charges the narrow range it governs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
An abstract frieze holds few orders, and this one holds some by integration and more by naming. Integrated: death and the act of mourning, carried by the rhythm; the body, in forms at human scale and in the bodily readings the ovals permit; and a public order, the state, since the elegy is for a republic, carried by the title and by the solemnity of the frieze, as a monument carries it. Named rather than held: history, the Spanish war of 1936 to 1939; Spain and its culture; the politics of the painter’s generation. Absent: the family, labour, nature, any person, any story, and any sacred order beyond the ritual shape of lament. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The figure describes the form: a few orders held in one structure, more brought in by the title than built.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Inner Law at 8.2 and The Made at 8.1. One canvas whole at fifty-five years, in a stable acrylic with delicate passages of graphite and charcoal; one law, heavy black forms round or upright pressing on a light field in a slow alternation, kept without fault from mass to line; and a making carried in brushed, ragged edges, a black that reads as weight and not as fill, and intervals calculated without seeming so.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: death and mourning, the body and a public order are held in the frieze; history and Spain are named; the family, labour, nature, any person and any story are absent. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.0: the turn of the Elegies belongs to 1948 to 1950, and this canvas, twenty-three years in, accents the format rather than turns from it. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.3: the reach is the series’, and the canvas reorganises nothing in its field. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.4: the open questions are the series’ more than this canvas’s.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, The Unconcealment at 7.5, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 and The Swerve at 7.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.0, Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 91.5, an average of 7.625 that displays 7.6. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, their format, their history and the painter’s stated intentions, and of this canvas as a late, large and well-known instance, not in close detail; where a judgment turns on the particulars of this surface it is held more loosely. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, 1971, acrylic with graphite and charcoal on canvas, as it stands. The series, from its first drawing of 1948 to the painter’s last years, is context and is not scored: its turn and its reach are credited to the series, and the canvas is scored for what it does. No words are quoted: the title is given, and the painter’s account of the series is given in substance only, since its exact wording could not be checked. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the canvas’s holder and the year it was acquired, any longer title it carries, its exact dimensions, the exact count and placing of its forms, whether any colour other than black and the ground enters it, the occasion of the series’ first drawing, which canvases of the series are best known and where they hang, and the painter’s own word on the readings of the ovals.