Informant38

Robert Motherwell was only 21 years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, but its atrocities made an indelible impression on him, and he later devoted a series of more than 200 paintings to the theme. The tragic proportions of the three-year battle�more than 700,000 people were killed in combat and it occasioned the first air-raid bombings of civilians in history�roused many artists to respond. Most famously, Pablo Picasso created his monumental 1937 painting Guernica as an expression of outrage over the events. From Motherwell�s retrospective view, the war became a metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his Elegies to the Spanish Republic as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as abstract, poetic symbols for the inexorable cycle of life and death.