Friday 7 August 2020

MILTON GLASER - OBITUARY

 

MILTON GLASER – OBITUARY

This is a summary of the obituary by Deyan Sudjic that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 11th July 2020.

Milton Glaser

The American graphic designer Milton Glaser was born on 26th June 1929 and died on 26th June 2020.  He is chiefly remembered for the ‘I love NY’ logo which he designed.

Sudjic describes Glaser’s ‘I love NY’ logo as ‘entirely characteristic of his approach to design, and at the same time an atypical one-off’.  In 1976, New York State had commissioned an advertising agency – Wells Rich Green – to produce a campaign to turn around public perceptions of New York and attract tourists.  Glaser’s initial sketch of the ‘I love NY’ logo was done on the back of an envelope in a taxi: it is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  The logo is distinctive of Glaser’s ability to blend words and images to send a powerful message.  It also shows his ‘magpie-like way of picking up and repurposing visual ideas that were already in the air’.  Sudjic writes: ‘he was not a plagiarist, but he was exceptionally fluent in making use of the many languages of design’.  Glaser donated the ‘I love NY’ logo and received no payment for it at any time.  ‘It was a love letter to a city that had allowed him to go to college without paying tuition fees, and in which he lived and worked for most of his life’.  Glaser was born in the Bronx, New York City.  His parents were Hungarian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry cleaning and tailoring shop. 

Sudjic concludes his obituary thus: ‘Glaser reminds us of a US that we can admire.  He designed its logos, its magazines and record covers, its cafes, its posters and its book jackets’.

Friday 24 July 2020

STATUES ARE LIES. Jonathan Jones in The Guardian Website, 21st July 2020


STATUES ARE LIES.  Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian Website, 21st July 2020

Statues are lies, selfies in bronze – and you can’t bring history to life with dead art.  Why are we obsessed with putting up statues of new heroes to replace old villains like Edward Colston?  Reducing history to celebrity culture won’t help anyone understand the full scale and horror of slavery.  Jonathan Jones.
This is a summary of the article by Jonathan Jones which was published on The Guardian website on 21st July 2020.
Statues are lies
Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal which he submitted to a New York art exhibition 103 years ago caused the death of the statue as an art form.  Why, then, in the 21st Century are we ‘obsessing about putting up statues of new heroes to replace the old villains?  All this political radicalism is being betrayed by artistic conservatism’.
The deposition of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was a ‘dadaist act of creativity’ but the ensuing conversation about a replacement statue has been ‘sterile’, and ‘adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of slavery’ in the context of the British Empire.
A statue is ‘no more than a crude symbol’.  The survival of so many Victorian era statues in British cities arises from the view of 19th Century historians that ‘history was “created by great men” and their leadership’.  This view was ‘killed’ by the Great War, and it also ‘killed the statue’.  Duchamp’s urinal was first exhibited in 1917; Duchamp’s brother died on the western front in that war.  The British national war memorial, erected after the Great War, is a ‘stark, abstract image of infinite loss and suffering too vast to be contained in a statue of some supposedly heroic figure’.  Edwin Lutyens intended the Cenotaph to be a temporary monument, but ‘it became permanent by popular demand’.  ‘The crass lie of a sculpture’ was rejected and in its place, ‘the contemplative modern poetry’ of the Cenotaph was found to be acceptable.
Slavery is a tragedy equivalent to the First World War.  Jones asks what kind of artwork ‘could convey the scale and nature of the crime’ of Britain’s slave trade 1500 – 1860s. 
Jones considers the Second World War and concludes that it ‘defied anything a figurative sculpture could say’.  He considers the Motherland colossus at Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), and concludes that it is an ‘empty and inhuman display of Stalinist kitsch that does not admit the true chaos of battle’.
Jones asks whether the Shoah (Holocaust) could be commemorated with a statue of a prisoner at Auschwitz, and he concludes that it could not.  He refers to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin which is abstract: a ‘piece of prime real estate is rendered valueless by making it, for ever, a cemetery of abstract empty tombs’.
Jones writes about the ‘dark abyss beneath Cape Coast Castle in Ghana …. where thousands of captured Africans waited to be dragged in chains onto British ships in the 18th Century’.  Jones urges that ‘this void – this sepulchral black hole that tells a terrible truth about British guilt – should somehow be brought back to Britain … which surely it can by means of contemporary art, instead of another statue – another token symbol’.

Wednesday 3 June 2020

CHRISTO: OBITUARY


Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javachef): Obituary
This is a summary of the obituary of Christo Vladimirov Javachef – known as Christo - which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 2nd June 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.
Christo
Christo Vladimirov Javachef was born in Gabrovo, in the Bulgarian Balkans in 1935.  His mother was a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia; his father was a chemist who ran a state fabric factory.  ‘Their milieu was as progressive as the hardline communism of the Peoples’ Republic of Bulgaria allowed’.
From the age of 17, for four years, Christo studied at the academy where his mother worked: ‘he was an ardent exponent of Soviet socialist realism’.  In 1956 Christo moved to Prague to study theatre design and he ‘at last encountered European modernism’.  Christo subsequently moved, via Vienna, to Paris, and in the process became stateless.  There, Christo married Jeanne-Claude Planchon, ‘the daughter of an aristocratic French general’, and, together with their son Cyril they moved to New York in 1964 as illegal immigrants.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked together on the many large scale artworks which became their life’s work.  Darwent writes: ‘In the more than five decades of their collaboration they would complete 22 projects; rather more – 37 – were still unrealised at the time of Jeanne-Claude’s sudden death at the age of 74’.  ‘After 1994, their projects were signed “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”, and their earlier works retroactively catalogued as such’.
The wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin was prompted in 1971 by the receipt of a postcard from a friend in Berlin.  Christo’s request to wrap the building was turned down by the Bundestag in 1977, 1981 and 1987.  Approval was granted in 1994.  Darwent writes that Christo said that ‘the Reichstag was the only structure in a still-divided Berlin “that was under the jurisdiction of the Americans, the Soviets, the English, the French and the two Germanys”.  Like the artist himself, it sat on a no-man’s land between warring political systems.  “To me, as a Bulgarian refugee who fled communism, east-west relations are important” he said’.
Darwent writes: ‘At dawn on 24 June 1995, 90 professional rock climbers abseiled from the roof of the Reichstag unfurling 100,000 square metres of aluminised fabric as they went.  At a stroke, the hulk built under Wilhelm I was transformed into a piece of classical sculpture.  The point of this aesthetic reinvention was to put the building back into public ownership.  The wrapping of the Reichstag had only been made possible by the support of the people.  The Reichstag was owned not by (the then Chancellor) Kohl, but by “the German nation, by 80 million Germans”’.’
For all their works, Christo and Jeanne-Claude refused any sponsorship.  All their works were ‘too big to fit in a gallery, too expensive to own’. 
Christo Vladimirov Javachef died on 31st May 2020 at the age of 84.

Monday 1 June 2020

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ: OBITUARY


RICHARD  ANUSZKIEWICZ:  OBITUARY
Richard Anuszkiewicz: Obituary
This is a summary of the obituary of Richard Anuszkiewicz which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 30th May 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz was born 23rd May 1930.  He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, near to his contemporary Andy Warhol.  Like Warhol’s family, Richard Anuszkiewicz’s family ‘was working class, religious and came from Mitteleuropa’.   In 1947 Richard Anuszkiewicz won a National Scholastic Art award, and in the next year a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.  He graduated from here in 1953 with a BA in Fine Arts.  Richard Anuszkiewicz then obtained a Master’s at Yale.
At Yale, Anuszkiewicz began painting seriously, and, as he put it ‘non-objectively’.  His chief tutor was Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus.  After Yale, Anuszkiewicz, studied 1955-56 for a teaching degree at Kent State University, Ohio. 
In 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved ‘to a New York still in thrall to the abstract expressionists’.  In 1960 Anuszkiewicz was offered a show at the Contemporaries gallery on Madison Avenue.  After Alfred Barr – Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – bought one of Anuszkiewicz’s works – Fluorescent Complement (1960) – the show became ‘an overnight success’. 
Fluorescent Complement (1960) is a work in which yellow/green discs of colour float on a background which is blue, but with a white central area.  The yellow/green discs move disconcertingly on the blue background, and in the white centre the yellow/green discs appear to erupt towards the viewer. 
‘By 1961 there was a waiting list for his eye-popping pictures’.  A MoMA exhibition in 1965 – The Responsive Eye – brought Anuszkiewicz’s work to a wider audience.  This exhibition ‘would define what had lately been dubbed op (optical) art'.  Anuszkiewicz and the British painter Bridget Riley were ‘the stars of the show’.  This 1965 exhibition was ‘the high point of his career’.  Darwent writes how Anuszkiewicz’s works were ‘hard to live with’: space and colour move constantly and ‘trip each other up’ with no resolution.
In the next two decades, Anuszkiewicz moved on to more mathematical works.  A number of exhibitions of Anuszkiewicz’s works were held in the years since 2013.  Unlike Riley, there was no resurgence of interest in Anuszkiewicz, but this did not seem to concern him. 
Richard Anuszkiewicz died on 19th May 2020 at the age of 89.

Thursday 28 May 2020

JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD


JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD
This is a summary of an article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian newspaper which was published on 26th May 2020
Joan Eardley: Time a major exhibition was held
Joan Eardley’s recognition internationally was stalled by her death from breast cancer at the age of 42.  Family, friends and admirers are calling for a major exhibition as the centenary of her birth approaches.  At this challenging time for art galleries due to the COVID 19 pandemic, another particular challenge is to honour Joan Eardley in the autumn of 2021. 
The art historian Frances Spalding is quoted, referring to Joan Eardley’s ‘immersive experience of just vast waste and vast seas and vast areas of cliff at Catterline, a small village on the Kincardineshire coast’.  Frances Spalding also refers to Joan Eardley’s work done at Townhead, Glasgow.  Joan Eardley’s paintings of children in Townhead are widely celebrated.  At Catterline Joan Eardley ‘created her elemental panoramas of land and sea in thickly textured paint’.
Joan Eardley died in 1963: she had been too ill to attend her first solo exhibition in London that year.

Monday 11 May 2020

GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY


GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY
This is a summary of the obituary by Charles Darwent that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 9th May 2020.
Gillian Wise
The British artist Gillian Wise was born on 16th February 1936 and died on 11th April 2020.  She worked in geometric abstraction.
Her style was based in the ‘Soviet model of art-making’.  Wise graduated from the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in the early 1960s.  In 1961 she became the youngest member of the British constructivists – the group that had been founded by Victor Pasmore in the early 1950s.  But by this time, Darwent writes, ‘the idea of a geometric abstraction that was in some way political – and, more specifically, aligned to the left – had come to be seen as both out of date and faintly dangerous.  Like others of the group, Wise was taken up by Drian, a gallery founded by a Lithuanian refugee, Halima Nalecz, to show work spurned by blue-chip dealers of Mayfair’.
In 1963 Wise exhibited with Anthony Hill in a show called Reliefs / Structures at the ICA in London.  ‘Metal Relief with Horizontal Elements (1962)’ is a work by Wise and Hill which is now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.  In 1969, Hill won a British Council scholarship to research the history of Russian constructivism in the USSR: she studied in Leningrad.  Also in 1969, Hill exhibited in Helsinki in a show organised by the British abstractionist Jeffrey Steele.  Hill then left the constructivists to be a founder member of the Systems group.  Hill’s most successful years then followed, with definitive Systems group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and at the Polytechnic of Central London.  Darwent writes: ‘The group fell apart in 1975 on disagreements over its position on Marxism’.
In 1979 Wise was commissioned to produce a work for a stairwell at Cinema 1 at the Barbican Centre, London.  This work – ‘The Alice Walls’ – was in place for the building’s opening in 1982.  Wise was mystified as to why she should have been given the commission.  In an interview of 2017 she said: “It was certainly contrary to the prevailing prejudice of the art establishment”.  Wise received no acknowledgement for the work and was not invited to the opening of the building.
After ‘The Alice Walls’, Wise left Britain and lived in the USA and then Paris where she had a precarious existence.   In 2014 a plaque was placed at ‘The Alice Walls’, naming Gillian Wise as its maker. 

Tuesday 21 July 2015

MARK ROTHKO: WAS HIS MATURE COLOUR-FIELD STYLE A DIRECT RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST?

Mark Rothko: was his mature colour-field style a direct response to the Holocaust?
Mark Rothko’s works in the Tate Modern in London are housed in their own room.  Since I first encountered these works in the 1970s when they were in the Tate Gallery, I have been aware of the power of Rothko’s mature colour-field style and the fact that it has a great public appeal and sells for huge sums. 
And the mature-style works by Rothko are regarded by many as having a ‘spiritual’ effect on the viewer.  The large size, the mesmerising wall of single colour and the sensitive ‘flickering’ edges of the colour field – as well as the luminous appearance of the colour field – all attract the observer in contemplation as of a great and deep mystery. 
In my curiosity about the meanings of abstract art painted in the 20th Century, and about the ways in which the Holocaust is commemorated and presented in the visual arts, I wanted to know what connections exist between Rothko’s Jewish identity, the history of 20th Century art and Rothko’s reaction to the Holocaust.
This blog entry is based on work that I undertook during a sabbatical in the summer of 2015.  All works referred to are listed in the Bibliography below.  Funding for the sabbatical was provided by the Bishop of Chichester, St.Matthias Trust and Ecclesiastical Ministry Bursary Awards.  
Introduction: Mark Rothko aka Markus Rothkowitz
Mark Rothko – a Jew - was born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia – now Daugavpils, Latvia.  He emigrated to the USA with his family at the age of ten.  His father died when Rothko was 11 years old. 
By the age of twenty two he had chosen an artist’s life and he had moved to New York City where he taught art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Centre – a job he maintained for 27 years until he was 49 years old. 
Rothko married Edith Sachar in 1932; the marriage ended in divorce in 1944 when Rothko was 41 years old.  He married Mary Beistle a year later: the marriage produced a son Christopher and a daughter Kate. 
Rothko’s mother died when Rothko was 45 years old – in 1948. 
At the age of 55 – in 1958 - Rothko was chosen – along with three other artists – to represent the USA at the XXIX Venice Biennale. 
Rothko and Mary separated in 1969 when Rothko was 63 years old: he moved into his studio on 69th Street in New York City.
Rothko died at his own hand in 1970 at the age of 67. 
What is the origin, significance and the meaning of Rothko’s mature style?   Why are Rothko’s mature style works described as having a ‘spiritual’ effect on some of those who view them?  May we say that Rothko’s mature style works were painted in response to the Holocaust? 
Rothko in 1945
Writing in 1945, Rothko wrote in a Personal Statement (in ‘Writings on Art’) that he ‘quarrels with surrealist and abstract art only as one quarrels with father and mother .... the Surrealist has uncovered the glossary of the myth and has established a congruity between the phantasmagoria of the subconscious and the objects of everyday life.  This congruity constitutes the exhilarated tragic experience which for me is the only source book for art ..... the Abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.  But I repudiate his denial of the anecdote just as I repudiate his denial of the material existence of the whole of reality.  For art to me is as anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness’.
In a concluding statement to this, Miguel Lopez-Remiro writes, in his Introduction to Rothko’s ‘Writings on Art’: ‘Rothko is in search of a symbol of permanence’. 
Lopez-Remiro makes this statement in the light of Rothko writing to Barnett Newman in July 1945 saying: ‘I have assumed for myself the problem of further concretizing my symbols, which give me many headaches but make my work rather exuberating.  Unfortunately we can’t think things out with finality but must endure a series of stumbling toward a clearer issue’.
As Clearwater puts it in her ‘The Rothko Book’: Rothko was painting by ‘a process that led to such well-resolved surrealist paintings as ‘Phalanx of the Mind’ and ‘Ceremonial’.  Clearwater reminds us that in Rothko’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’ (probably of 1940-41 and published in 2005), Rothko clarified why he wanted to make his symbols more concrete: Rothko praises the ability of children and ‘primitive’ artists to create symbols that ‘represent the unseen power of their environment’. 
We may conclude that in 1945 Rothko was in search of a ‘symbol of permanence’.  His ‘source book’ was ‘the exhilarated tragic experience’.  His works were to be ‘anecdotes of the spirit’.   It would be in 1949/50 that Rothko’s mature colour-field style began to appear.
Clearwater writes that by 1947 Rothko realised that he must free himself from surrealism ‘in order to create a truly transcendent art’ (Clearwater’s words). 
What else was going on in 1945?
World War Two ended in 1945. 
a)    Godfrey, writing about Newman (2007), states: ‘In 1945 Newman had written about ‘the photographs of the German atrocities’ and he had criticised surrealist artists for failing to respond to the Holocaust.   Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) was widely known in the USA: it was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1946.  Some American critics did not acknowledge as significant Chagall’s presentation of the crucified Christ surrounded by burning synagogues and scenes of destruction in the shtetl.  Most critics however, including Harold Rosenberg and Herbert Howarth, did understand the significance: ‘in the European Holocaust Jewry has undergone a new mass crucifixion’.   American Jewish artists used Christological symbolism in the 1940s, and Amishai-Maisels writes that by the late 1950s this had become a mannerism.
b)    Van Voolen (2011) writes of Lee Krasner’s painting ‘Composition’ of 1949, that it includes hieroglyphics devised by Krasner, and that after the Holocaust, many non-observant Jews, like Krasner, were attracted to expressions of Jewish continuity such as language, alphabet, texts and the new Nation State of Israel.
c)    Godfrey, writing about Newman (2007), records a symposium in Philadelphia in 2002 when Benjamin Buchloh referred to Newman’s ‘skinny paintings’ of 1950: he advanced the view that Newman’s abstract style is an acknowledgement of the ‘impossibilities of lyric painting in the wake of the Holocaust’. 
d)    van Voolen (2011) writes of Morris Louis’ ‘Charred Journal Series’ of paintings of 1951, which was shown in an exhibition of 1953, that Louis began working in an abstract style because Louis considered it ‘the only appropriate medium to express the haunting and unrepresentable nature of the Holocaust’.  
Was Rothko’s art of the late 1940s and early 1950s a direct response to the Holocaust?
In the context of what we know about Newman, Krasner and Louis in the late 1940’s, is there any evidence to show that Rothko’s art of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a direct response to the Holocaust?
Clearwater writes about Rothko’s work ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ of 1942.  This was painted at the time when Rothko was shedding the widely-held conviction that figure painting should dominate: he was moving into paintings such as ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ which contained abstracted symbols that had a surreal presence.  The abstracted symbols in this painting are one of Rothko’s earliest uses of ‘morphological forms’.  The myth is based on Aeschylus’ play ‘Agamemnon’, in which Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis who had caused winds to blow that prevented Agamemnon’s fleet sailing to Troy to join battle.  The various ‘morphological forms’ in the painting can be read as each being representative of players and actions in the myth: some of these forms had previously been used and developed by Rothko in earlier paintings. 
Rothko included ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ in his first solo exhibition at Art of This Century in 1945. 
Clearwater writes about the parallels between the circumstances of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter and the sacrifice of young lives in World War Two ‘for the sake of humanity’.
When reading Rothko’s letters and notes from the period January 1st, 1940 to 31st December, 1950, there are some allusions to World War Two but nothing that can be understood as being a direct reference to the Holocaust.
These are the two relevant entries.
In June 1943 Rothko and his fellow modernist Adolph Gottlieb wrote to the New York Times in response to a negative review by Edward Alden Jewell.  Barnett Newman also assisted in editing the text of the letter.  Six preliminary drafts are published in ‘Writings on Art’, together with the text of the letter as sent, and as published by the New York Times in full on June 13, 1943. 
In the first – and longest – draft, Rothko and Gottlieb have asserted that ancient and ‘primitive’ art contains timeless truths that can be presented by the artist as being relevant to every age. 
They then assert that the artists of the past may have been prophets who ‘saw the potentiality for carnage which we know too well today.  But why press home this point?  The artist paints and what he must’.  This direct mention of current carnage is not in the letter as published. 
The published letter includes a paragraph that had not appeared in any of the drafts.  This new paragraph provides a simple explanation of Gottlieb’s ‘The Rape of Persephone’ of 1943 (which Edward Alden Jewell had described as unintelligible) that states: ‘”The Rape of Persephone” is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth; the representation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth.  Would you have us present this abstract concept with all its complicated feelings by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?’ 
[In simple terms, the Rape of Persephone is the myth of the abduction of Persephone – a goddess of nature - by Hades, the feared, powerful god of the underworld, of the dead, and of riches.  (The riches of mineral wealth and of agriculture emerge from under the ground).  Hades takes Persephone as booty.  Persephone became the goddess of the underworld who caused Spring to break, plants to flower and creation to be fertile.  Thus, Persephone was abducted into the realms of death, but she made herself known each year in the vitality of growth before descending once more.  As Queen of the Underworld, Persephone was also understood to carry into effect the curses of the living on the souls of the dead.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone ]
In 1946 Rothko wrote an Introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition of works by Clyfford Still in which Rothko wrote: ‘For me, Still’s pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone Myth.  As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are “of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated”’.
It is unclear whether, in 1943, Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman would be fully aware of the Holocaust, so their reference to contemporary carnage may well have been to the war in general.  We may conclude that Rothko, Gottlieb and their editor Newman decided that allusion by means of Greek myth was more attuned to the general thrust of the letter, which is that the ancient myths speak directly to the present. 
On October 13, 1943 Rothko and Gottlieb took part in a radio programme.  They answered questions about modern art that had been submitted by listeners. 
Rothko and Gottlieb are insistent that art changed with Picasso and Braque and that the modern world demands that artists make new art.  The two artists explained their use of mythological characters.  Gottlieb says that these are myths that Rubens, Titian, Veronese and Velazquez used, and he asks why modernists are challenged about working to the same myths. 
Rothko explains that their works are not ‘abstract paintings with literary titles’, as a questioner had suggested.  He says that modernists’ representation of ancient myths ‘must be in our own terms, which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves – more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than the graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must re-describe their implications through our own experience.  Those who think that the world of today is more gentle and graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art’. 
In reply to a final question about subject matter, Gottlieb states that ‘in times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant.  All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life.  That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact, and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings, is superficial or meaningless.  That is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed’.
Conclusion
The greater part of Rothko’s writings in ‘Writings on Art’ are: Rothko’s writings on the teaching of art to children; autobiographical and personal notes; letters about exhibitions and reviews; notes for exhibitions; and personal letters to Barnet Newman.
Therefore we may conclude that throughout the 1940s, as Rothko moved from figure painting to abstracted symbols (morphological forms representing ancient myths) to multiforms (the precursor to his mature colour-field style) he did not make any written statements about his work being a direct specific response to the Holocaust or to the events of World War Two, other than acknowledging that the ancient myths speak to contemporary tragedy.
Instead, we see in Rothko a deep commitment to discover a way of painting that does justice to the tragic nature of humanity, as a contemporary complement to the ancient myths.  This tragic nature is shown to Rothko in contemporary events.  It is likely that, as Godfrey writes of Newman, in the immediate post war era the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have been both too painful and too obvious to address explicitly by Newman and his contemporaries.
The process that led to Rothko’s mature style
Rothko’s desire to engage with human emotion to achieve unity
In Rothko’s Crucifixion painting ('Untitled') of 1941/42 (in the New York Jewish Museum) we see that since at least the early 1940s, Rothko’s concern had been the fragmentation and compartmentalism that afflicted individuals and society as a whole.  The 1941/42 painting  separates the upper and lower part of the painting by two crucified arms – one above the other, one a right arm and the other a left arm – on which the hand is pierced by a nail.  Above the arms is a semi-human form which comprises several human faces, with the open eyes as the dominant features.  Below the arms, on the left are several human pairs of legs – some fleshed and other skeletal.  In the lower right side of the painting there are two nailed feet, emerging as from out of a wooden box and above them, in a separate wooden box, is a human fist.  The background to the whole painting is vertical red and white stripes.  The ‘floor’ on which the assemblage stands is also painted as red and white stripes.  Clearwater writes that in the early 1940s Rothko was interested in the symbolic content of ancient mythology, and the potential of myths to achieve personal unification in the present day.  Rothko wrote in his ‘The Artist’s Reality’: ‘we have religion to serve our souls, we have law to serve our notions of temporal and property justice, we have science to qualify the structural world of matter and energy, we have sociology to deal with human conduct .... and we have psychology to deal with man’s subjectivity’.  Clearwater writes that several of Rothko’s paintings from the early 1940s ‘represent multiple crucifixions, with figures that are fragmented and compartmentalised.  The architectural details provide a unifying structure to these scenes of communal suffering’. 
In the lecture given by Rothko’s son Christopher on June 11, 2005 concerning his father’s ‘The Artist’s Reality, Christopher Rothko states that in ‘The Artist’s Reality’ his father was critical of modern art for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement.  Christopher Rothko said, paraphrasing his father: ‘unlike the scientist, the artist cannot have separate truths, separate unities and separate fragments of the universe: the artist must always resolve his fragment in man’s subjectivity’.  His father expresses his distress at the atomisation that is prevalent around him: artificial separation and lack of inter-communication’.
Rothko expresses the view in ‘The Artist’s Reality’ that the artist, like the philosopher and the poet, needs to resolve all the various laws and systems into one picture: ‘a unity’. 
Rothko’s ‘multiforms’
In 1947 Rothko wrote an essay for the first and only edition of the journal ‘Possibilities’.  The essay was entitled ‘The Romantics were Prompted’.  Clearwater writes that in this essay (published in ‘Writings on Art’), Rothko described his ‘transitional abstract paintings’: his ‘multiforms’ as they are now referred to.  He stated that the ‘forms’ in these paintings were ‘performers’, each painting being a ‘drama’.  Three ‘multiforms’ are illustrated in Clearwater’s book: ‘No.18’ (1946-7); ‘No.1 Untitled’ (1948); and ‘No.9’ (1948).
In ‘The Romantics were prompted’ Rothko writes ‘I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers ...... Neither the action or the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance ..... Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur .... The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed.  Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.  He is an outsider.  The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need’. 
Rothko concludes by writing of the essential loneliness of humanity; he writes: ‘It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breaching and stretching one’s arms again’.
Tactile space, illusory space and ‘space intuition’
In a commentary on the ‘multiform’ ‘No.18’ (1946-47), Clearwater writes that in his ‘The Artist’s Reality’ Rothko had described the tension between the two kinds of ‘space intuition’: the tactile and the illusory. 
Tactile space presents objects that could be measured and touched.  In contrast, illusory space involves the use of perspective: the illusion of a three-dimensional world is created within the bounds of the painting.  Tactile space accords with the way in which we see things.  The conventions of illusory space must be learned: space recedes to a vanishing point; colours recede through greys to make them muted. 
Since an early stage in his painting career, Rothko had tended to paint in tactile space rather than illusory space: his backgrounds were part of his foregrounds.  He used colour to express emotion; he did not want to be restricted by the conventions of perspective. 
Rothko had long been interested in ‘space intuition’: the way in which colour is recognised and read by the brain.  Clearwater refers to the article by Douglas MacAgy – who was the Director of the School of Fine Arts in California - in his ‘Magazine of Art’ of 1949.  MacAgy had engaged Rothko to teach at the School in the summers of 1947 and 1949.  MacAgy writes about Rothko’s desire to unify tactile and illusory space.  MacAgy affirmed that the ‘multiforms’ were a continuation of Rothko’s surrealist representations of ancient Greek myths.  Clearwater writes that in the period 1947 – 49 Rothko was preoccupied by the myth of the battle between Dionysius and Apollo: this myth ‘represented the conflict between the objective and subjective comprehensions of reality.  Transformation and tension were the means for conveying it’.  The tension between objective and subjective may be read as also the tension between tactile space and illusory space. 
Rothko’s desire to unify tactile space and illusory space within his paintings
By the mid 1940s, as he developed his ‘multiforms’, Rothko introduced an additional dimension to tactile space: his ‘forms’ – ‘performers in the drama – are painted in a way that suggests that the forms exist within a surrounding atmosphere which impinges on the ‘forms’.  This is the beginning of Rothko wanting to unify tactile space and illusory space within his paintings.  In ‘No.18’ Rothko moves in this direction by using warmer colours (which appear to come forward) and cooler colours (which appear to recede).  Each of the ‘forms’ is painted in a way that lets them ‘breathe’ and ‘move’: none of them is represented by a flat unvarying colour; instead they are made of modulated colour.
Many ‘multiforms’ were produced by Rothko between 1946 and 1949: these were experiments in a new territory. 
In his ‘Writings on Art’ there is a letter from Rothko to Clay Spohn (a Professor at the California School of Fine Arts with whom Rothko established a friendship) dated September 24th, 1947.  Rothko writes this statement, which Lopez-Remiro considers ‘an important statement’: ‘Elements occurred (in San Francisco) which I shall develop, and which are new in my work, and that at least for the moment stimulate me – which gives me the illusion – at  least – of not spending the coming year regurgitating last year’s feelings’. 
Lopez-Remiro writes that Rothko is referring to his first ‘multiforms’. 
The transition from ‘multiforms’ to Rothko’s mature style
Clearwater shows that Rothko’s transition from ‘multiforms’ to his mature style was gradual and that there is not a painting that can be said to be the first of his mature style.  
For example:
     i.        ‘No.17’ of 1949 shows the edges of the ‘forms’ to have a similar style to the edges of the blocks of colour in his mature style works: the composition has four blocks of colour, each rooted in a corner of the canvas, and there is a fifth block interposed between two of the corner blocks. 
   ii.        ‘No.11 / No. 20’ of 1949 has a small number of large ‘forms’ grouped on the canvas in a manner similar to the mature style, but the blocks are still rooted in the corners and the edges on one of the blocks are hard, and this block is painted in unrelieved, flat colour. 
 iii.        ‘No.8’ of 1949 has a light-coloured block above a red-coloured block in the mature style, but there is also a continuous bar of light colour running down the left had side of the composition. 
But ‘No.3 / No.13’ [Magenta, Black, Green on Orange] of 1949 has six horizontal blocks of colour on a red ground in a composition very near to the mature style.  Clearwater writes that this was exhibited at Rothko’s one-man exhibition in 1950 in the Betty Parsons Gallery and that ‘it came close to his classic painting’.   Clearwater analyses how this painting works, and how it demonstrates the functioning of a mature work by Rothko.  The dimensions and proportions of the bands of colour are made in a way that they complement the colour of each band and its place in the canvas. 
Rothko achieves the illusion that the bands of colour are moving against each other in position and depth: dramatic tension is achieved, and the viewer is transfixed by her/his heightened senses as they watch and examine the painting, and enter into its depths.  She concludes: ‘For Rothko, the manner in which a successful work materialised would be as mysterious to him as to the viewer’.
In a transcript from a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, published in ‘Interiors’ in May 1951, Rothko is recorded as having said: ‘I would like to say something about large pictures and perhaps touch on some of the points made by the people who are looking for a spiritual basis for communion.  I paint very large pictures, I realise that historically the function of painting large pictures is something very grandiose and pompous.  The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be intimate and human.  To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass.  However you paint a larger picture, you are in it.  It isn’t something you command’.
‘A leap of faith to create unprecedented gestures’
In relation to his 1942 work ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ (see above) Clearwater observes that Rothko had had an enduring interest in sacrifice, having painted crucifixions in the 1930s and the early 1940s (see above). 
Clearwater writes that Rothko was still interested in sacrifice in 1958, when he spoke about Kiekegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’ in a lecture to the Pratt Institute.  Specifically Kiekegaard writes about the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.  In 1958 Rothko equated the un-understandable act by Abraham with the act of faith made by an artist who ‘takes a leap of faith to create unprecedented gestures’. 
In 1958 Rothko also spoke about the question that Kiekegaard raises: ‘Should Abraham tell his wife Sarah, and Isaac, that God had commanded him to sacrifice Isaac?’   Kiekegaard concludes that Abraham could not do this because he would not be able to explain himself.  Rothko then spoke about artists who ‘want to tell all like at a confessional’ and said that he preferred reticence. 
Clearwater concludes that in retrospect Rothko concluded that his paintings of the early 1940s ‘gave too much specific information’.  He concluded that to achieve ‘universal symbols of permanence’ which were to be ‘anecdotes of the spirit’ he must ‘sacrifice the figure to make a unique gesture’. 
Rothko concluded that there was ‘more power in telling little than in telling all’.
The Seagram murals
In 1958 Rothko accepted a commission to produce a series of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant at the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City, between 52nd and 53rd Street.  In 1958 and 1959 Rothko produced about 30 paintings for this commission.  In these works Rothko employed a new style of composition which had vertical and rectangular shapes.  In simple terms, these echo the architectural shape of the room in which they were to have been hung, but the ‘doorways’ and ‘gates’ of colour that result also tend to invite the viewer to visually enter the painting and so they set up an additional tension in an already ‘moving’ picture. 
Clearwater writes: ‘The Seagram paintings should be seen as his continued drive to contain, reflect and generate light, and to create an infinite space that would provide viewers with the experience of the human condition’.
Rothko subsequently withdrew from the commission: he was allowed to retain the paintings. 
Clearwater discusses the influences on Rothko in the composition and colour of the ‘Seagram murals’.  Rothko was interested in the effects of projected light.   And he visited Italy in 1959 and was impressed with the architectural effect within Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence: the blind windows create a reversal of expectation; they are windows that one looks to, but through which one sees nothing.  The murals are all very large.  Their ‘doorways’ and ‘windows’ and the brightness with which they are painted make them glow enticingly.  The manner in which Rothko painted the fields of colour allows the background colour field to shine through and create an illusion of movement.  
Clearwater identifies a painting by Rothko of 1939 in which he depicts a group of people gathered on a stairway at an entrance to a subway station.  The viewer stands below ground looking up to the figures who are enclosed by the walls and ceiling of the stairs, and by the stairs on which they stand.  And there is a small rectangle of a differently modulated light which stands behind and above the people: the sky.  Clearwater states that Rothko made the sky ‘look simultaneously opaque and infinite’.  The tension between the two different kinds of light and the disorientating effect of looking upstairs is similar in effect to Rothko’s Seagram Murals. 
Some of the Seagram Murals were subsequently donated by Rothko to the Tate Gallery, and it is these which now hang in the Tate Modern.
Conclusion
We may conclude that Rothko followed a consistent path throughout the 1940s to achieve a new style of art in 1950: the mature colour field union of tactile and illusory space. 
We cannot say that the ‘miraculous’ art that Rothko produced was a direct response to the Holocaust.  Rather it was the gift to humanity of a man who was troubled by atomisation within the individual and within humanity as a whole, who suffered the archetypal suffering of the Jew in the 20th Century, and who wanted, through art, to reach out and provide healing and hope to a broken humanity.
Mark Rothko was a great artist.
Bibliography
·         A summary of a podcast by the National Gallery of Art: a recording of a lecture dated 11 June 2005 given by Christopher Rothko about Rothko’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’, probably written in 1940-41 and published in 2005.  The summary is mine and is at http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/mark-rothko-artists-reality.html
·         Clearwater. B. ‘The Rothko Book’.  2006. 
·         Godfrey. M. ‘Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’. from ‘Abstraction and the Holocaust’.  2007. Yale
·         Ed. Lopez-Remiro. M. ‘Writings on Art’. 2006.
·         Van Voolen. E. ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.  2011.  Prestel.