To look closely at Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) and Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70 without having researched in detail the circumstances under which each was created is to be aware of the power of language to shape perception and evaluation of abstract art. It is as if half of the enterprise of creating an abstract painting involves rhetorical cleverness in the matter of titling it, and a reliance on whatever sense or knowledge of culture and history the viewer brings to the project of looking at the painting.
Cued by Pollock's title, the viewer is drawn at once to the earth tones and to the implications of movement (rhythm) associated with an autumn storm in which leaves are swirling around and during which the multiple colors of summer yield to the winding-down of the life cycle of nature. The whole effect is amplified by the sheer scale of the work, which is about eight feet high and eighteen feet long; the size of a painting with a theme of nature appears meant to capture something of the natural environment and give the viewer a virtual experience of this virtual moment of nature.
What the viewer must bring to Motherwell's painting is some knowledge of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and the doomed republic; also useful would be knowledge of the fact that this painting is one of a series of some 200 that share the same theme and title, except for the series number (Spector). Armed with these facts, the fact that the palette of this painting (and the rest of the Elegy series) is limited to black, white, and brown takes on interpretive meaning, suggesting something of the moral starkness of the events in Spain. The scale of the painting, while not as large as Pollock's, bespeaks an artist's intention to make a comment on recent history. The idea of commentary and moral sensibility is also reinforced by the large size of the black figures, which occupy much of the space of the work, on the lighter back...