How can we observe Motherwell’s reworking of his canvases (and titles) through their exhibition history? How did critics understand his early work, before signifiers like “Irascible,” “New York School,” and “Abstract Expressionism” cohered around Motherwell and his contemporaries? My colleagues and I were enmeshed in these questions (and more, so many more questions), as we delved into the pleasures (and frustrations) of research.

A turn of the page reveals an image—more precisely, a photograph, and in its frame is a grid of other photographs and viewers who come closer for examination.