Robert Motherwell was one of the leading figures among the American painters known as the Abstract Expressionists. Of all the works he made during his long and distinguished career he is best known for his extended Elegy series of paintings. The first of these took its title from a poem by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who had died during the Spanish Civil War. The poem was a lament - an elegy - for a bullfighter killed in the ring. In the paintings this event becomes a metaphor for the tragedy of the Civil War and, Motherwell said, more generally 'the contrast between life and death'.