Concerned with the global threat to democracy, American artist Robert Motherwell completed over 100 paintings between 1948 and 1967 that reflected on the deaths of 700,000 people during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). He responded to the potential rise of fascism in Spain by channeling his sense of frustration with the incalculable toll brought about by war into the creation of this work. Black columns and egg-like shapes hover against a background of yellow ochre and white. Elegy to the Spanish Republic CII belongs to a series of works that became a touchpoint for Abstract Expressionism, an art movement where painters used abstract forms, symbols, gestures, and color to speak the unspeakable.