Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell’s Afternoon in Barcelona epitomizes the bold chromatic contrasts and charged gestures that mark the artist’s signature canvases. Although nonrepresentational, the imagery evokes natural forms, perhaps scenery viewed during Motherwell’s travels in Spain in the late 1950s (the work is part of his Iberia series). Indeed the tripartite configuration—which he called a “dolmen,” in reference to prehistoric stone megaliths— may have associations with the bull ring in Barcelona. Talking about two other paintings in the same series, he stated: “You would have to know that a Spanish bull ring is made of sand of an ocher color, and that Spanish bulls are very small, quick, and coal black. Both of those coal black, ocher pictures have a bull in them, but you cannot really see the bull. They are an equivalence of the ferocity of the whole encounter.” While the angular shapes lend the work a loose structure, the artist’s slashing brushwork suggests that his creative process may have been largely spontaneous, particularly as he was influenced by Surrealist automatism, a free-associative technique of drawing or painting thought to better access the subconscious. 

Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, Motherwell was a leading figure of the New York School, one whose paintings, drawings, prints, and collages imparted the Surrealists’ biomorphic forms and intuitive methods to the grand scale and allover compositions that distinguished Abstract Expressionism. Motherwell was an early theorizer of the movement, promoting its modernist ideals through his activities as a writer, editor, teacher, and lecturer.