Mark Rothko Rothko, Christopher
2015, 2015-11-24
eBook
"The journey to understand the painting is also the journey to understand Rothko, because the work is so thoroughly suffused with the man."-Christopher Rothko
Mark Rothko (1903-1970), world-renowned ...icon of Abstract Expressionism, is rediscovered in this wholly original examination of his art and life written by his son. Synthesizing rigorous critique with personal anecdotes, Christopher, the younger of the artist's two children, offers a unique perspective on this modern master. Christopher Rothko draws on an intimate knowledge of the artworks to present eighteen essays that look closely at the paintings and explore the ways in which they foster a profound connection between viewer and artist through form, color, and scale. The prominent commissions for the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Seagram Building murals in New York receive extended treatment, as do many of the lesser-known and underappreciated aspects of Rothko's oeuvre, including reassessments of his late dark canvases and his formidable body of works on paper. The author also discusses the artist's writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the significance of music to the artist, and our enduring struggles with visual abstraction in the contemporary era. Finally, Christopher Rothko writes movingly about his role as the artist's son, his commonalities with his father, and the terms of the relationship they forged during the writer's childhood.
Mark Rothko: From the Inside Outis a thoughtful reexamination of the legendary artist, serving as a passionate introduction for readers new to his work and offering a fresh perspective to those who know it well.
Art has always been important for religion or spirituality. Secular art displayed in museums can also be spiritual, and it is this art that is the subject of this book. Many of the works of art ...produced by Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and Anselm Kiefer are spiritual in nature. These works reveal their own spirituality, which often has no connection to official religions. Wessel Stoker demonstrates that these artists communicate religious insights through images and shows how they depict the relationship between heaven and earth, between this world and a transcendent reality, thus clearly drawing the contours of the spirituality these works evince.
While Mark Rothko's canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. "The people who weep ...before my pictures," he commented in 1956, "are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by "religious experience" has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothko's Jewish identity-informed by his experiences in Russia and New York-influenced his understanding of "religious experience" in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothko's work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothko's sense of "religious experience" as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artist's Jewishness.
HAUNTED ABSTRACTION Pappas, Andrea
Journal of modern Jewish studies,
07/2007, Letnik:
6, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Most scholars have not attempted to interpret Mark Rothko's paintings of the very early 1940s in other than general ways. They have either followed the artist's statements that the paintings engaged ...generic or universal themes, or have investigated the ideological work performed by abstract expressionism. Yet Rothko repeatedly stressed the notion that his works had subject matter even while he circumscribed the limits of their interpretation. Examining the iconography of some of these early works reveals that they almost certainly did address specific, contemporary subject matter that the artist had an interest in suppressing, particularly at the time. That subject matter was deeply connected to his identity as a Jew. The strategies by which Rothko negotiated that subject matter and its suppression were part of his self-fashioning as an artist.
During the summer of 1968, while vacationing in Provincetown MA and convalescing from a dissecting aortic aneurysm that left him in a deep depression that ended in his suicide in Feb 1970, Mark ...Rothko took up painting in acrylic again; it was a medium he had begun to experiment with after making the Houston chapel murals, which impress their solemn monumentality on the viewer. As late works, made mostly throughout 1969, the "Brown on Gray" acrylic paintings on paper might appear to express the conditions of Rothko's death: aware of the fragility of his health, both physically and psychologically, the artist lived out the remainder of his life in recognition of the fact that he could die at a moment's notice. Here, Werschkul discusses how the depression or the melancholia affected Rothko and his later works.
Mark Rothko, 1958 Jewish identity increasingly figures in new histories of modernism in general, analyses of American art, and, recently, abstract expressionism.1 Although abstract paintings have ...signified "Jewishness" only since the late sixties, this essay looks at the antecedents of such re-identification in one canonical figure, Mark Rothko, examining three paintings from a narrow range of time in the early days of World War II. Absence and its tropes figure as major themes in Holocaust studies in the examination of postwar cultural production, a field that turns its gaze primarily to literature and film.2 sometimes visual art is included in this discourse, such as Morris Louis's early abstractions, the Charred Journal series (1951).3 However, most studies of Jewish visual artists issue from the field of art history, focusing on artists' Jewish identity, and may or may not include the Holocaust or antisemitism as major issues shaping their work.4 When the Holocaust structures artwork in a major way, it is often through this notion of absence, referring to both the lost Jews of World War II and the cultural future they would have carried with them, elaborated and developed had they lived.
"Abstract expressionism was America's great aesthetic movement--or so said the artists. A new MoMA show may (unwittingly) make us reconsider that claim." (Newsweek) In this article, David ...Wallace-Wells ponders the question "how American was abstract expressionism, really?"
Action Figures Schjeldahl, Peter
The New Yorker,
05/2008, Letnik:
84, Številka:
15
Magazine Article
"'Action/Abstraction,' at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates some superb pieces: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract ...Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by other members of American art's greatest generation (notably Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still)." (New Yorker) This essay illuminates the vastly influential American art work derived from the 1950s which is on display at the Jewish Museum's "Action/Abstraction" art exhibit. In addition to the previously mentioned contributors, "Action/Abstraction" will also play host to the works of Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Arshile Gorky. "The New York avant-garde art world of the nineteen=fifties consisted of about two hundred and fifty artists and a couple of dozen critics, curators, dealers, and collectors."
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