By 1964 Motherwell was teaching at Columbia University, protesting the war in Vietnam, and preparing major exhibitions of his work in New York and Washington D.C. The following spring he purchased on thousand sheets of fine Japanese paper at a shop in New York and used them to make about six hundred small drawings in colored ink. He had planned to use all the paper for his new series, Lyric Suite, but stopped upon learning of the death of his friend the American sculptor David Smith in a car accident.
Motherwell worked quickly and without conscious control, executing between ten and fifty drawings a session. The ink soaked into the absorbent paper with every stroke of the brush. “Each picture would change before my eyes,” he wrote. “The pictures literally continued to paint themselves as the ink spread in collaboration with the paper.”
