?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
ROBERT MOTHERWELL Lament for Lorca.
Color lithograph on handmade paper, 1981-82. 1010x1435 mm; 39 3/4x56 1/2 inches, full margins. Initialed and numbered 1/52 in pencil, lower right. Printed and published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., with the blind stamp, lower right. A superb impression of this large lithograph.
Motherwell (1915-1991) began work on his celebrated Elegy to the Spanish Republic theme, which would occupy a considerable part of his career and significantly impact Abstract Expressionism, in 1948. He conceived the series as a lamentation or funeral song following the decades of atrocities that marked the Spanish Civil War. The recurring motifs of the theme are a series of vertical ovals and rectangles repeated in varying sizes and distortions. Motherwell related the motif to the display of the dead bull's testicles in the Spanish bullfighting ring.
This image, his Lament for Lorca, pays homage to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. Motherwell was a champion of Lorca's work and his poems relating to the bullfighting culture in particular. Belknap 254.
