Black and Tan, which is in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY. The size and content suggest that Motherwell intended to create a monument to heroism in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica. In 1965 Motherwell worked on another prominent series called the Lyric Suite, named after Alban Berg's string quartet. Motherwell recalled, "I went to a Japanese store to buy a toy for a friend's kid, and I saw this beautiful Japanese paper and I bought a thousand sheets. And I made up my mind, this was in the beginning of April 1965, that I would do the thousand sheets without correction. I'd make an absolute rule for myself. And I got to 600 in April and May, when one night my wife and I were having dinner and the telephone rang. And it was Kenneth Noland in Vermont saying that I should come immediately. And I said, 'what's happened?' And he said, 'David Smith's been in an accident'." Smith, the sculptor, was Motherwell and Frankenthaler's friend. The couple drove hastily to Vermont, arriving 15 minutes after Smith had died. Motherwell stopped work on the series. He said of them: "And then one year I had them all framed, and I like them very much now. I should also say that I half painted them and they half painted themselves. I'd never used rice paper before except occasionally as an element in a collage. And most of these were made with very small, I mean very thin lines. And then I would look at amazement on the floor after I'd finished. It would spread like spots of oil and fill all kinds of strange dimensions." In 1967 Motherwell began to work on his Open series. Inspired by a chance juxtaposition of a large and small canvas, the Open paintings occupied Motherwell for nearly two decades. The Opens consist of limited planes of colour, broken up by minimally rendered lines in loosely rectangular configurations. As the series progressed, the works became more complex and more painterly, as Motherwell worked through the possible permutations of such reduced means. The late 1960s saw Motherwell using Gauloises packets and cartons in many collages, including an extensive series with the packets surrounded by bright red acrylic paint, often with incised lines in the painted areas. In 1972, Motherwell married the artist-photographer Renate Ponsold and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut,