Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was a baldness figures of American Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Writer, editor and painter – Nobel Prize in 1990 - Motherwell always showed great interest in Spanish culture and, especially, with some Republican authors. His engravings illustrated poems of Rafael Alberti and Octavio Paz, who also collaborated in the promotion of culture through numerous magazines, such as Taller, Plural and Vuelta.

The Juan March Foundation reshaped by its own funds this special relationship with Spain and "poets", replicating aspects already addressed in the retrospective devoted to the artist and in 1980 (the first in Spain). The interrelationship between his prints and writings not only respond to the actual circumstances and coincidences between the three protagonists during the decades of the 70 and 80, but alos has references to literature and painting as universes of images that refer to other images and texts that refer to other texts. Motherwell "writes" with an abstract caligraphy, but from a text whose meaning evokes the peace and Alberti. And these, in turn, come to the office of the painter with brush strokes of words which suggest other forms of art and visually significant objects.

The exhibition is presented in three blocks centered in the narrative lithographs illustrating various poems by Paz; the illustrations for the book El Negro Motherwell, written and presented at the opening of this first retrospective in 1980; and, finally, a section on the Library Julio Cortázar of Octavio Paz, who took her home in Paris and was donated to the Fundación Juan March by his widow, Aurora Bernárdez, in 1993. Alejandro MartÍnez

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