Painting: Lochinvar's Return

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Motherwell proved a fast learner. The great lesson "of what modern art is all about," he believes, was first stated by French Symbolist Poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1864: "Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces." For the young Motherwell, the easiest way to set this down was by combining oil, gouache and pieces of torn paper. Today his elegantly signed collages—which often combine pieces of French Gauloises cigarette packages, an envelope from his English bookseller or a football ticket—sell for from $3,500 to $5,500, are considered by connoisseurs the most elegant in the medium.

Gay with Banners. Motherwell followed the surrealists' injunction to take doodling seriously as a way of tapping subconscious images—"only the doodling is done on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, not of the telephone pad." To illustrate a friend's poem in 1948, he made his most haunting "doodle": three powerful vertical bars with three hard-pressed black ovoid forms caught between each. They could have been prisoners trapped behind bars or, as Modern Museum Curator Frank O'Hara suggests, "bulls' tails and testicles hung side by side on the wall of the arena after the fight." Motherwell titled it Elegy to the Spanish Republic, and has obsessively used the visual metaphor 102 times in the intervening 17 years, even adapting it to the Irish Rebellion, until it has become his trademark. For the Modern's show, five Elegies, ranging up to 20 ft. in length, were lined up side by side along one wall, an ominous but noble salute to life and death in the Spanish Republic.

"We rush toward death," Motherwell says; but the trip obviously has its pleasures. Now married to his third wife, Painter Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell commands top prices ($25,000-$30,000) for his large oils, is a gourmet who owns a Manhattan townhouse, vacations in Venice and Greece. And even in his large-scale (7 ft. by 17 ft.) treatment of such serious subjects as Dublin's Easter Rebellion, the black bars of the Elegies now seem to have opened and the middle field made gay with banner forms. For his next commission, a mural in the Gropius-designed John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Office Building in Boston, the bars will hopefully be burst even farther asunder. Whatever emerges, Motherwell will not lack for space: the mural will cover 224 sq. ft., looming high over the lobby.