As their titles make plain, "Elegy Study I" and "Elegy Black Black" both feature the abstract form that Robert Motherwell called the “elegy,” a central and recurring motif in his work. Motherwell described this form, created through alternating oval and rectangular shapes, as “silent, monumental, more architectonic, a massing of black against white, those two sublime colors.” For Motherwell the dark and somber forms evoked historical tragedies. Having first hit upon the motif in one of his drawings in 1948, he explored the “elegy” in his paintings, then revisited the motif in his gestural lithographs. In the large-scale "Elegy Study I" we see it expressed expansively; in "Elegy Black Black" the motif unfolds across the page, abutted by geometric forms and paired with lines from Spanish poet Rafael Alberti’s 1980 poem Negro Motherwell [Motherwell in Black].