-Mark Rothko and Adolph Gotllieb manifesto, published in 1943 in the New York Times.
Anyone who knows me knows, my favorite artist is Mark Rothko. But it always seems to me that he gets overshadowed by other artist in the late 20th century or simply no one knows who he is. This Blog is meant to correct fix that.
Posts tagged: color fields
![“Some critics have seen these [The Black on Black paintings] paintings as Rothko’s pointed reminder that there was more to his work than lyric color—that his real subject was (as he had declared in 1943) the “tragic and timeless.” Others have seen them as tokens of the illness and depression that began to plague Rothko in the 1960s, even as harbingers of his suicide at the end of the decade.
But does black = tragedy and despair? While it does absorb more light than any other color, it is not just a void. Depending upon the quality of paint and its application, as well as shifting angles of light, the blacks here can look like steel or velvet, silver screens or black holes. Other colors lie in wait under a surface or peek around an edge. But to notice all this takes time: unless we look at the paintings slowly, we will not see what Rothko called their “inner light.”“
- From the National Gallery of Art Website](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsapyqSSkC1qjy996o1_400.jpg)
“Some critics have seen these [The Black on Black paintings] paintings as Rothko’s pointed reminder that there was more to his work than lyric color—that his real subject was (as he had declared in 1943) the “tragic and timeless.” Others have seen them as tokens of the illness and depression that began to plague Rothko in the 1960s, even as harbingers of his suicide at the end of the decade. But does black = tragedy and despair? While it does absorb more light than any other color, it is not just a void. Depending upon the quality of paint and its application, as well as shifting angles of light, the blacks here can look like steel or velvet, silver screens or black holes. Other colors lie in wait under a surface or peek around an edge. But to notice all this takes time: unless we look at the paintings slowly, we will not see what Rothko called their “inner light.”“ - From the National Gallery of Art Website
I’ve never really made personal post on this blog and before yesterday I never really thought to. The point of this blog was simply to share Mark Rothko with people who loved his work and people who had never heard of him. Simply this blog is about Rothko, not me. But after visiting the Museum of the Art Institute in Chicago (I was visiting a friend up here) I felt I had to share this experience with all of you who read this blog. I have only ever seen one Rothko in person. It was a color field….a very small one…and it was at the High Museum in Atlanta. I love that painting but it wasn’t the traditional Rothko size where as a viewer you can literally fall into his painting. That was something I had always wanted to see but never had the chance. On Saturday I saw two of his massive color fields, each one I believe I have posted on this blog at some point. All I can say is that therenis nothing like seeing these paintings up close. The two paintings I had the opportuninty to see are below and I promise the online versions do not do them justice. If you get the chance go see them. You can see the brush strokes and the differences in the shades going on through the blocks of color. The dripping in the opposite direction that it was hung made me laugh. When I left the museum those paintings were all I could think about. I can’t even begin to explain the amount of work I saw Saturday, and while most of it feels like a blur, those few minuets in front of Rothko’s paintings slow down in my memory as if I had spent the entire day staring at those two paintings. Taken from the The Art Institute of Chicago website
Mark Rothko
Untitled, 1949
oil on canvas
54-7/8” x 43-7/8” (139.4 cm x 111.4 cm)
“It’s like looking into something very deep. You could fall in.” So says Mad Men’s Ken Cosgrove while looking at the Mark Rothko painting in Bertram Cooper’s office. That’s a reaction the artist would have appreciated, since he described the work from his most famous period — large-format paintings of blurry-edged rectangles in complementary colors — as “intimate and intense.”
Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), 1949
“It is clear that Rothko hoped to harness the grandeur of religious painting. The principles of frontality and iconic imagery in his mature works are common to traditional altarpieces, and both formats have similar dimensions and proportions. Often larger than a human being, Rothko’s canvases inspire the kind of wonder and reverence traditionally associated with monumental religious or landscape painting.”
- Jennifer Blessing From the Guggenheim website
Mark Rothko
No. 14, 1951 (Ca. 1949-1951)
oil on canvas
56-1/2 x 65” (143.5 x 165.1 cm)
Untitled (Black on Gray)
“It was Rothko’s euphoric veils of diaphanous pure color that led critics to praise him as a sensualist and a colorist, which pained him because he believed that his champions had lost sight of his serious intentions. For him the canvases enacted a violent battle of opposites—vertical versus horizontal, hot color versus cold—invoking the existential conflicts of modernity. The Black Paintings, begun in the year before the artist’s suicide, confirm Rothko’s belief that his work encompassed tragedy. The desolation of canvases such as Untitled (Black on Grey), drained of color and choked by a white border—rather than suggesting the free-floating forms or veiled layers of his earlier work—indicate that, as Rothko asserted, his paintings are about death.”
- Jennifer Blessing From the Guggenheim website
Mark Rothko by Marjorie Cohn, Eliza Rathbone, Fondation Beyeler, Mark Rothko
“By considering Rothko’s central groups of works from all creative periods—among them the Rothko Room in the Phillips Collection and the Harvard Murals at Harvard University—this book documents the artist’s struggle to arrive at “a consummated experience between picture and onlooker.” Rothko’s adamant insistence on controlling the presentation of his works set him apart from the art scene as early as the 1950s. His pictures were to be hung closely together in small rooms, in which soft lighting and imposing scale were to provide an immediate viewing experience. This book attempts to recreate that atmosphere with a large, uninterrupted plate section that brings to life the vibrancy and power of these paintings.”
- From the product description on the books Amazon.com page.
The book is 204 pages all together and most of the user reviews give the book five stars.
Mark Rothko Number 19, 1949 not currently on display
“Like many of the New York School painters of the 1940s, Mark Rothko was largely influenced by Surrealism, creating allegorical abstractions depicting biomorphic and mythological forms. By 1947 he abandoned representational imagery entirely and began working with color, light, and space. Number 19 follows the characteristic format of his multiform paintings, in which loosely defined organic shapes hover over a thinly brushed background. Whereas color once assumed a supporting role in his compositions, by this period, color had become a defining force, thus marking the transition from Rothko’s early work to his mature, color-field paintings.”
- Picture and Text from The Art Institute of Chicago’s website
Rothko moving Untitled,1954 (seen inverted), photograph by Henry Elkan. Picture from National Gallery of Art website.
“Alternately radiant and dark, Rothko’s art is distinguished by a rare degree of sustained concentration on pure pictorial properties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale, accompanied by the conviction that those elements could disclose the presence of a high philosophical truth. Visual elements such as luminosity, darkness, broad space, and the contrast of colors have been linked, by the artist himself as well as other commentators, to profound themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime. Rothko, however, generally avoided explaining the content of his work, believing that the abstract image could directly represent the fundamental nature of “human drama.”“
-From National Gallery of Art website, Washington, DC
