At Five in the Afternoon

Robert Motherwell

1915–1991

At Five in the Afternoon, 1950

Oil on hardboard

At Five in the Afternoon is the first large-scale oil painting from Robert Motherwell's series Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which was inspired by the devastations of the Spanish Civil War (1936). The title quotes a refrain from the elegiac 1935 poem “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”), by the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, who was executed by fascist military authorities in 1936.

These and later works in the series represent Motherwell's attempts to find a “visual equivalent” to Lorca's poetry, and to draw a symbolic portrait of modern Spain. Scored and cut, the painting's heavy and irregular black ovoid shapes could represent the display of the dead bull's testicles in the bull-fighting ring, or bodies that have become sites of violence. Embodying both creation and destruction, the painting offers a visceral sensation of the cycles of life and death.