Robert Motherwell’s Lyric Suite is a group of colored drawings on rice paper. The suite was Motherwell’s first foray into rice paper as a medium (apart from its use as collage material). He decided in 1965 – as a testament to pure automatism – that he would undertake to paint 1000 sheets of rice paper without correction or conscious thought.

During April and May of that year, Motherwell worked on the floor of his studio on First Avenue in New York, surrounded by sheets of rice paper, listening to a rendition of Alban Berg’s 1925 composition titled Lyric Suite.

Using a technique he had developed with German and American inks, Motherwell had painted nearly 600 sheets before receiving a call that his close friend (David Smith) had been in a car accident; when Smith died, works for Motherwell’s Lyric Suite were boxed up and cast aside. Soon after, Frank O’Hara (then-director at New York’s Museum of Modern Art) arranged the paintings in Motherwell’s studio and titled each.