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.
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