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Mark Rothko

Mark ROTHKO
American 1903 - 1970
Untitled no.37 (Red)
1956
glue, oil, synthetic polymer paint and resin on canvas

Mark Rothko has always been a favourite painter of mine, and so when I discovered that the National Gallery of Victoria housed one of his renowned colour-field canvases I was elated. Generally I am drawn to Rothkos’ overlapping blocks of pigment that seem to oscillate and even float in front of the materiality of the canvas itself.

During the 1940s Rothko experimented with a Surrealist style, influenced by Miro, and by the late 1940s he was starting to produce abstract and colour-field painting, and his interest in the work of Matisse affected his use of pure colour. During the 1950s Rothko developed his signature Abstract Expressionist style – large canvases with squares of colour in a limited palette. The soft edges of these fluctuating squares, their scale and the absence of a point of focus, create a vehicle for meditation and spirituality. Throughout his career Rothko worried a great deal about the reception and interpretations to which his paintings might be subject. He claimed to hate art critics and art historians and feared their analysis might destroy the mystery surrounding his work.

Rothko wished to reassert the picture plane; he was for flat forms because they destroy illusion and truth. He was certainly fully aware of the spiritual dimensions attainable through abstract art and this shows in his deeply religious later works. They are objects for contemplation. They demand silence and the spectators’ complete absorption in them. “I am not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else”; Rothko is reported as saying in one 1957 interview:

I am only interested in expressing the basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.
(S.Rodman, ‘Conversations with an Artist’, New York, 1957)

With Rothko the texture of the canvas is allowed to remain as if it had been dyed rather than painted. He soaked hi paints into the canvas and the two or three banks of colours which form the composition are scrubbed over the other very thinly painted areas, creating an effect of luminous grandeur unique to Rothko. In contrast with the sober simplicity of the forms the colour is very opulent and subtle; the forms glow and throb as the spectator stands before them on the brink of an enormous luminous void.

With Rothko the texture of the canvas is allowed to remain as if it had been dyed rather than painted. He soaked hi paints into the canvas and the two or three banks of colours which form the composition are scrubbed over the other very thinly painted areas, creating an effect of luminous grandeur unique to Rothko. In contrast with the sober simplicity of the forms the colour is very opulent and subtle; the forms glow and throb as the spectator stands before them on the brink of an enormous luminous void.

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