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Mark Rothko: Notes on Rothko's Surrealist Years
Catalogue of show April 24-30 May 1981 at The Pace Gallery, includes notes on Rothko's Surrealist Years by Robert Rosenblum, Catalogue with images of works by the artist.
- GenresArt
40 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
49 people want to read
About the author
Robert Rosenblum
116 books9 followersRobert Rosenblum was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of multiple volumes on modern and contemporary art, including The Paintings of August Strindberg and Paintings in the Musee d'Orsay. Rosenblum is the recipient of a Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2024
This is another book from my list of books to read after Finals. I became interested in Rothko after seeing the Seagram Murals at Tate Modern. It’s the closest I’ve had to a spiritual experience while looking at art. He was also mentioned in a novel I read at the time (around 2002), Twelve by Nick McDonell, that also fetishized Nietzsche and North Face jackets, and was set in New York (thanks to Fran for helping me find it!). This is a collection of essays by academics about Rothko’s life and work, his own statements about art (which he stopped making public by the early 1950s), and his materials. It also includes about 100 reproductions of his paintings, including early works that I wasn’t familiar with. I had no idea that he went through classical mythical symbolist and surrealist phases before he found his recognizable abstract rectangular forms. I was expecting to understand more about what led him to take his own life in 1970 (apart from depression), but I’m not much wiser about that. I was aware that some of his paintings got increasingly dark towards the end of his life. I also didn’t know that his later paintings were executed with the help of assistants. Presumably by this stage he was able to afford it, but I also think it was a result of some health problems. I was fascinated that some of his works, including the Harvard Murals, have deteriorated and changed how they look due to the synthetic materials he was using. He ran out of paint during the project and bought some cheap paint from Woolworth’s! Some of his last paintings were also made on paper.
July 29, 2010
My first delving into art criticism. Very interesting!
Some passages from a couple of the critics I liked:
By Irving Sandler:
p. 11 As Rothko wrote: ‘The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy...finite associations.’ He soon stopped titling his pictures and expunged from them any semblance of nature, symbols or signs. These had become ‘obstacles’ in the way of a clear presentation of his ‘idea’. Instead of depicting ‘fragments of myth’ calligraphically, Rothko began to paint irregular washes of color, but he found them too diffuse and drifting. Toward the end of 1949, he reduced these amorphous areas into a few softly painted and edged rectangles of atmospheric color, placed, or, rather, floated symmetrically one above the other on somewhat more opaque vertical fields. He also greatly enlarged the size of his canvases. These ‘classic’ abstractions, as they have come to be known, were at once unprecedented and the culmination of a long development...
...
‘We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.’
p. 12 qualities which evoke the sublime, among them vastness, oneness, infinity, vacuity, and darkness.
...
Bigness can overpower, reduce the observer. It can also produce an effect of intimacy; the latter is what Rothko desired. ‘To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereoptician view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.’
p. 13 Hubert Crehan wrote, ‘Rothko’s vision is a focus on the modern sensibility’s need for its own authentic spiritual experience.'
p.16 Modern Man’s tragic awareness of death freed him to live. This is an existentialist conception; as William Barrett, a philosopher friendly with the Abstract Expressionists wrote, ‘In the face of death, life has an absolute value. The meaning of death is precisely the revelation of this value.’
p. 17 Rothko said in his talk at Pratt, ‘there is more power in telling little than in telling all.’
...
to replace conventional subjects was Rothko’s own self-trancendent experience as revealed through art, through painting, and above all, color, the inherent expressiveness of color.
p. 18 Confronting the central issue in Rothko’s work, Goldwater wrote: ‘Rothko claims that he is “no colorist,” and that if we regard him as such we miss the point in his art. Yet it is hardly a secret that color is his sole medium. In painting after painting...there are handsome, surprising and disquieting harmonies, and supposedly difficult colors are made to work together with apparent ease. There is a sense in which one is inclined to agree with him, or rather to say that Rothko has been determined to become something other than a colorist...[What:] Rothko means is that the enjoyment of color for its own sake, the heightened realization of its purely sensuous dimension, is not the purpose of his painting. If Matisse was one point of departure...Rothko has since moved far in an opposite direction. Yet over the years he has handled his color so that one must pay ever closer attention to it, examine the unexpectedly joined hues, the slight, and continually slighter, modulations within the large area of any single surface, and the softness and the sequence of the colored shapes. Thus these pictures compel careful scrutiny of their physical existence...all the while suggesting that these details are means, not ends.
by Robert Rosenblum:
p. 21 Some found Rothko’s luminous veils of color fraudulent voids, whose nothingness defied any reasonable expectation of what one should look at in a framed and painted rectangle of canvas, whereas others found them mysteriously silent and radiantly beautiful. Created in New York after the apocalyptic conclusion of World War II, they seemed to signal a drastic rupture with pre-war traditions of both European and American painting.
p. 26 Typically, a Luminist painting confronts us with an empty vista in nature (often a view of sea and sky from the shore’s edge) that is more colored light and atmosphere than terrestrial soil; and if there is any movement at all in these lonely contemplations of a quietly radiant infinity that seems to expand in imagination even beyond the vast dimensions of the North American continent, it is that of the power of light slowly but inevitably to pulverize all of matter, as if the entire world would eventually be disintegrated by and absorbed into this primal source of energy and light.
Some passages from a couple of the critics I liked:
By Irving Sandler:
p. 11 As Rothko wrote: ‘The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy...finite associations.’ He soon stopped titling his pictures and expunged from them any semblance of nature, symbols or signs. These had become ‘obstacles’ in the way of a clear presentation of his ‘idea’. Instead of depicting ‘fragments of myth’ calligraphically, Rothko began to paint irregular washes of color, but he found them too diffuse and drifting. Toward the end of 1949, he reduced these amorphous areas into a few softly painted and edged rectangles of atmospheric color, placed, or, rather, floated symmetrically one above the other on somewhat more opaque vertical fields. He also greatly enlarged the size of his canvases. These ‘classic’ abstractions, as they have come to be known, were at once unprecedented and the culmination of a long development...
...
‘We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.’
p. 12 qualities which evoke the sublime, among them vastness, oneness, infinity, vacuity, and darkness.
...
Bigness can overpower, reduce the observer. It can also produce an effect of intimacy; the latter is what Rothko desired. ‘To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereoptician view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.’
p. 13 Hubert Crehan wrote, ‘Rothko’s vision is a focus on the modern sensibility’s need for its own authentic spiritual experience.'
p.16 Modern Man’s tragic awareness of death freed him to live. This is an existentialist conception; as William Barrett, a philosopher friendly with the Abstract Expressionists wrote, ‘In the face of death, life has an absolute value. The meaning of death is precisely the revelation of this value.’
p. 17 Rothko said in his talk at Pratt, ‘there is more power in telling little than in telling all.’
...
to replace conventional subjects was Rothko’s own self-trancendent experience as revealed through art, through painting, and above all, color, the inherent expressiveness of color.
p. 18 Confronting the central issue in Rothko’s work, Goldwater wrote: ‘Rothko claims that he is “no colorist,” and that if we regard him as such we miss the point in his art. Yet it is hardly a secret that color is his sole medium. In painting after painting...there are handsome, surprising and disquieting harmonies, and supposedly difficult colors are made to work together with apparent ease. There is a sense in which one is inclined to agree with him, or rather to say that Rothko has been determined to become something other than a colorist...[What:] Rothko means is that the enjoyment of color for its own sake, the heightened realization of its purely sensuous dimension, is not the purpose of his painting. If Matisse was one point of departure...Rothko has since moved far in an opposite direction. Yet over the years he has handled his color so that one must pay ever closer attention to it, examine the unexpectedly joined hues, the slight, and continually slighter, modulations within the large area of any single surface, and the softness and the sequence of the colored shapes. Thus these pictures compel careful scrutiny of their physical existence...all the while suggesting that these details are means, not ends.
by Robert Rosenblum:
p. 21 Some found Rothko’s luminous veils of color fraudulent voids, whose nothingness defied any reasonable expectation of what one should look at in a framed and painted rectangle of canvas, whereas others found them mysteriously silent and radiantly beautiful. Created in New York after the apocalyptic conclusion of World War II, they seemed to signal a drastic rupture with pre-war traditions of both European and American painting.
p. 26 Typically, a Luminist painting confronts us with an empty vista in nature (often a view of sea and sky from the shore’s edge) that is more colored light and atmosphere than terrestrial soil; and if there is any movement at all in these lonely contemplations of a quietly radiant infinity that seems to expand in imagination even beyond the vast dimensions of the North American continent, it is that of the power of light slowly but inevitably to pulverize all of matter, as if the entire world would eventually be disintegrated by and absorbed into this primal source of energy and light.
September 21, 2009
This was originally published to go with a retrospective of Rothko's work, which was held at the Tate Gallery in London in 1983. It's an interesting publication, but falls short, largely because the plates are no where near numerous enough to give a true picture of the artist. Also, the essays, contributed by various authors (including Rothko, in the form of excerpts from longer works)tend to be a bit repetitive, and, in some cases, a overstuffed and wordy.
The book has its moments, but there are far better publications on this fascinating and difficult artist.
The book has its moments, but there are far better publications on this fascinating and difficult artist.
December 26, 2016
Excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the goals Rothko had. Why paint something so huge, etc. Good reproductions, when taken into account that one really should look these pictures in person for only then can you be embraced and swallowed whole by them.
March 10, 2015
Well written, not so great translated in Dutch. Missed opportunity.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews