Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108, 1965-67

Certainly these shocks of the new accounted, to some degree, for the art's popular appeal or at least curiosity. But the artists themselves were interested mainly in form. Much as they sought to break away from tradition, they incessantly studied the great artists of the past. Robert Motherwell, the most intellectual of the AbEx artists, titled his most famous painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic, and its black swaths seem to convey a tale of hope snuffed out. But the painting isn't so different in form from his earlier, much brighter, sprightlier The Voyage, which was inspired by a Baudelaire poem and greatly influenced visually by the Jazz collages of Matisse, who, as Motherwell often said, inspired and moved him more than any other 20th-century artist.