What Robert Motherwell Chose to Paint About

Motherwell is filed under abstraction, but his subjects were specific. The Spanish Civil War, the act of painting itself, and the literary Europe he read shaped nearly everything he made.

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The short answer

Robert Motherwell's subjects were less objects than obsessions. His dominant theme was the Spanish Civil War, revisited in more than 100 Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings from 1948 until his death in 1991. Around it sit three recurring subjects: automatist gesture, the picture plane itself in his Open series, and literary homage.

The Spanish Civil War as Lifelong Subject

The clearest subject in Robert Motherwell subjects in art is Spain. In 1948 he began a small painting intended as a study for a larger work, and the motif took hold. The Elegy to the Spanish Republic series grew into the longest sustained project of his career, running from the late 1940s until 1991. He described the works as laments for the Spanish Republic, which fell to Franco in 1939. The forms are abstract, black ovals and vertical bars on white, but the subject was never abstract to him.

It is worth being precise about what kind of subject this is. Motherwell was not depicting battles or figures. He was painting grief as structure, the way a funeral march is music about death without showing a funeral. The repetition matters. Each new Elegy is another return to a wound that would not close, and the series numbers well over a hundred canvases and works on paper. Few abstract expressionist themes have been pursued with that kind of single-mindedness.

Automatism and the Painter's Own Hand

The second subject is process. Motherwell came to painting through philosophy and read the Surrealists seriously, particularly their idea of automatism, letting the hand move before the mind censors it. Much of his work is about the moment of marking a surface. The gestural paintings of the early 1950s, with their slashing strokes and spilled ink, treat the artist's own nervous energy as the subject matter.

This is why his abstractions resist being read as pure decoration. A Motherwell canvas usually records a decision made quickly and then confronted. In his collages, assembled from papers and fragments across four decades, the found material functions the same way. The subject is the encounter between the artist and whatever landed on the table. Readers weighing how such work translates to a wall can see the difference between scale and detail in a canvas edition see how a canvas edition carries gesture.

Recurring motifs to look for

Black ovals and vertical bars repeated across the Elegy series
Broad gestural strokes in black against raw white grounds
Collaged papers, labels and fragments from printed ephemera
Simple horizontal bands and rectangles in the later Open series

Europe, Literature and the Open Series

The third subject is literary Europe. Motherwell was unusually bookish for an abstract painter. He made prints and drawings responding to James Joyce's Ulysses, and his titles reach repeatedly toward French poetry and Spanish politics. For him, abstraction was not a rejection of subject matter but a way of honoring subjects that figurative painting handled badly. This places him apart from the more purely formal abstract expressionist themes of some contemporaries.

In the 1960s he distilled all of this into the Open series, paintings of a bare rectangle of light within a colored field. The motif recalls a window or a doorway, and Motherwell linked it to the idea of an opening in a wall of sound or paint. It is the quietest subject he ever chose. Those comparing his restraint with more figurative painters will find the contrast instructive compare with The Coal Scuttles.

Motherwell painted the same grief for forty years and called each version a new question.

Subject	Where it appears	What it carries
The Spanish Civil War	Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, 1948 to 1991	Mourning and political memory
Automatist gesture	Early 1950s paintings and works on paper	The artist's own decision-making
Literary Europe	Joyce and French poetry inspired prints and collages	Abstraction as homage
The opening	Open series, from the 1960s	Silence, light, a held space

Motherwell's recurring subjects at a glance

Key takeaways

Motherwell's central subject was the Spanish Civil War, pursued across more than a hundred Elegy paintings.
Automatism made his own gestures and decisions a recurring subject in their own right.
Literature, especially Joyce and French poetry, supplied themes he rendered abstractly rather than literally.
The Open series of the 1960s reduced his subject matter to a single luminous rectangle.

Related questions

Why did Motherwell paint the Spanish Civil War when he never fought in it?

He was of a generation that experienced the war as a moral catastrophe watched from afar, and he said the Elegies were laments rather than illustrations. The paintings mourn a defeated republic, not a personal memory. The abstraction was a way of keeping the grief general and unresolved.

Are the Elegy paintings really abstract if they have a subject?

Yes, in the sense that the black forms do not depict anything specific. Motherwell argued that abstraction could carry content as surely as figuration. The subject sits behind the forms. Knowing the title changes what you see without changing what is painted.

What is the Open series and how is it different from the Elegies?

The Open series began in the 1960s and consists of a colored field interrupted by a simple rectangle of lighter ground, like a window. Where the Elegies are dark, rhythmic and funereal, the Opens are still and luminous. They show the same painter working at nearly the opposite emotional register.

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