TITLE: No. 1. Mark Rothko, 1964 NAME: Virginia Medina León

TITLE: No. 1. Mark Rothko, 1964

NAME: Virginia Medina León

DATE: 28.4.2015

WORD COUNT: 1.250 words Abstract

Mark Rothko, artist and philosopher of his time, has often been seeing as mysterious and contradictory. One needs to be cautious while approaching his paintings: a “house with many man- sions” as de Kooning once remarked. Nevertheless his fascinanting world is full of secrets and intimate emotions where every aspect of his life is reflected.(Fig.1) This revolutionary artist strongly committed with colour is proposed to connect with the human psy- che almost like a catharsis. Rothko, a portraitist of the human soul, uses the paths of contemplation, meditation and introspection as a way to reach a trascendental state.

Fig.1 Contents

Introduction p.1 Main body p.2 Conclusion p.10 Bibliography p.11 List of illustrations p.12 Introduction

I have always been interested in how the basic human emotions are represented in art and design, how something so intangible can be translated to a surface, without losing its intensity. This inquietude took me to explore into the world and thoughts of Mark Rothko’s, known worldwide for its long beauty expressions of feelings. After searching on many of his classic paintings I discovered the one which I felt more identified by the messages where hidden in it. The No. 1 artwork, executed in 1964 and actually exhibited in the National Gallery of Art, Washin- gon, DC, USA. A canvas of 266.5 x 203.2 cm, done in mixed tecnhique and belonging to the Abstract Expressionism. The researching process was not difficult when it comes to a such important artist but it was the selection of the material. Trying to discard the banal and focusing on what I was looking: emotions and feelings. I found most of my research by secondary resources, biographies books, essays, different museums websites and online interviews. The quality of the information was good enough, the comments of gallerists and his own family took me to the point I was searching for. My approach with this material is to focus into his personality, how his time conditioned him deeply and why he wanted to transmit emotions through his work.

1 Main body

Mark Rothko Biography 1903-1970

Mark Rothko was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, born at Dvinsk in Russia in 1903. He and his family immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1913. Rothko attended a scholarship at Yale University in 1921, but he gave up his studies and in 1923 he moved to New York City. Rothko's nature was always more that of the self-taught man than the diligent pupil. This was the beginning of his life as an artist, his first encoun- ter with members of the American avant-garde. In his early years as an artist, in the 1930’s, Rothko painted pictures influenced by Matisse, mainlly urban scenes with simplified compositions and flat areas of color. In 1935 he got associated with The Ten, a group of Expressionist tendency, whose misión was to protest against the reputed Ame- rican painting and literal painting. During the early 1940’s decade he developed a Surrealist idiom, influenced by mythological symbols, he started making watercolours, horizontal zones of misty colour and working with biomorphic imagery related to Ernst and Miró. Two important events impacted in Rothko's life: the beginning of World War II and his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both forced him to develop his own language aimed to express the tragedy of human condition. By 1947, Rothko turns into a complete abstraction, getting rid of surrealism or mythic imagery, his paintings are now fields of colour, large soft-edged areas of color with a symmetrical presentation. This year he creates the transitional "multiform" paintings characterized by the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two or three opposing or contrasting, colours. Himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure and units of human expression. The "multiforms" brought Rothko to a realization of his mature, signature style, the only style Rothko would never fully abandon. He refused conventional titles, just using numbers or colors in order to distinguish one work from another.(Fig.2) The artist also now resists explaining the meaning of his work. "Silence is so accura- te," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination. Additionally, for the next years, Rothko painted in oil only, on large canvases with vertical formats in a very large scale with the purpose to make the viewer feel enveloped within the painting. In relation with this, Rothko stated:

2 “ I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very 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 redu- 1 cing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. ”

Fig.2 Despite his fame, Rothko felt a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion and that the true purpose of his work was not being understand by collectors, critics, or audiences. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential, and therefore, must be understood on this way. His interest was:

“ only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate 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 2 you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point. ”

1 Barbara Hess, Abstract Expressionism (New York: Taschen, 2005) 2 Qiu, Jane. Rothko’s methods revealed (London: Nature, 2008)

3 For Rothko, color is “merely an instrument.” The multiforms are, in essence, expression of basic human emotions. Rothko’s work began to get darken dramatically during the late 1950s. This development is related to his work on a mural commission for the Four Seasons restaurant, located in the Seagram Building in New York City. He refused to continue with the Project because he considered this space preten- tious and inappropriate for the display of his Works. Here Rothko turned to a palette of red, maroon, brown, and black. For many critics of his work this new colours was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life. On the 1960’s his fame and wealth increased; his paintings began to be selled to notable collectors, including the Rockefellers. By this time the art world had turned its attention to a new artistic movement, Pop Art. In 1964, Rothko received his most important commission, from Dominique and John de Menil, to execute murals for a chapel in Houston.(Fig.3) The commission gave him the opportunity to fulfill one of his life’s ambitions, to create a monument that could stand in the great tradition of Western religious art. For the chapel, Rothko used only two colours, red and black as vehicles for an expression of transcendental existence. The Houston paintings created a total environment, an atmos- phere of poetry and light. The Rothko’s Chapel represents his gradually growing concern for the transcendent. These works would be his final artistic statement to the world. In 1970 Rothko died in New York by his own hand.

Fig.3

The New York School

Mark Rothko was one of the preeminent artists of his generation, he belonged with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, to the Abstract Expressionists, sometimes called New York School artists.(Fig.4) They were an association of avant-garde artists who lived in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. The group was also composed by other artists: poets, dancers, cho- reographers, prose writers, and jazz musicians. This was the begining of New York City’s influence as the center of the western art world, specifically in the Lower Manhattan. The first ideas of this artistic movement began to germinate with the political instability in Europe in the 1930s that brought several leading Surrealists to New York. Many of the Abstract Expressionists got profoundly influenced and interested in myths and archetypal symbols, creating a new style, a post-war mood of anxiety that combines self-expression and the chaos of the unconscious. Rothko and his peers moved away from European traditions of painting and created a new art movement using abstraction to develop a strong emotional and expressive content. They were often characterized by gestural brush-strokes and the impression of spontaneity. In the Abstract Expressionism there were two main streams: the Gesture of Pollock and De Kooning, a radical new technique that consisted in dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the ground. The other tendency was the Colour Field Painting, represented by Mark Rothko, Newman, and Still who created art based on simplified and colour-dominated fields. Both streams were recognized for their large-scale paintings that got far away from traditional pro- cesses, they often took the canvas off of the easel and used unconventional materials such as house paint.

Fig.4 5 Rothko and his time

Rothko and his peers were announced as the first authentically American avant-garde style, they were american in spirit, monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressing for an indivi- dual freedom. This artistic movement emerged in a climate of Cold War politics and social-cultural conservatism. World War II had positioned the United States as the world’s strongest power and in the years following the conflict, many Americans enjoyed the benefits of an economic growth- new cars, subur- ban houses and other consumer goods–were available to more people than ever before. A rebuilding Europe was hungry for American goods: fancy refrigerartors, range-top ovens, conver- tible automobiles and televisions became indispensable for the middle-classes. The sense of conformity was common in the American Society. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during World War II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men expected to be the breadwinners; women, assumed their place at home. In this way television contributed to this homogenizing trend reflecting the new social pattern. But not all Americans conformed to such cultural norms, by the mid-1950’s the spirit of optimism had changed into a potent mix of power and paranoia. The nascent civil rights movement and the crusa- de against communism divided the American society. At this point the Abstract Expressionism was for many peolple the expression of freedom: the freedom to create controversial works of art and the freedom symbolized by action painting. Other artists, writers, and musicians named as the"beat generation," rebelled against conventional values, people started to demand spontaneity, intuition over reason. All these facts provided models for the social revolution of the 1960’s. With this new decade, a new generation of artists was emerging. Pop Art, was fresh, vibrant and began to reflect contemporary values. The work of Warhol and Lichtenstein were taking over the Abstract Expressionism from the artistic scene. Rothko labeled Pop-Art artists as "charlatans and young opportunists that are out to murder me." Rothko did, in fact, refuse to shake Andy Warhol's after seeing a pop-art show. Something similar happened before when Rothko and his peers had once "stomped cubism to death" and erased Picasso from the artistic stage. Rothko believed that Pop Art wasn't the art of the moment, being replaced by Pop-Art was an into- lerable insult for him. His creations were meant to be timeless, and to have a communion between a painting and a viewer. Pop Art had no place for spiritual and psychological, it was an art of con-

6 sumption fueled by popular culture, mass media, advertisements, and television.

BlackForm Paintings

In this context, beginning 1964, Rothko founded his monochromatic stage with his Black- Form Paintings. They were a series of black paintings, which incorporated other dark hues and tex- ture effects. He recognised the Black-Form paintings as a serie and he numbered them sequentially No. 1 to No. 8. They were precursors to the 18 canvases Rothko painted for the Rothko’s Chapel between 1964 and 1967. (Fig.5) Rothko renounced to his coloured rectangles that had defined his much-admired works of the 1950’s. Instead he limited himself to a single black rectangle in a black or nearly black field. Although his palette became more austere Rothko never lost the sight of one of his favorite painters, Henri Ma- tisse. The french painter said about his work, “I began to use pure black as a color of light and not 3 as a color of darkness.” In all of the Black-Form paintings, the canvases surface contains a square shaped, that fluctuates with a background combined with different colors that finally seems to be painted black on black. These little-known works have often been seen as symptoms of the depression and illness that began to hit Rothko and that finally took him to suicide in 1970.

Fig.5

3 Stephanie Rosenthal, Black Paintings(exh. cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2006)

7 No.1

Finally the matter of study is this painting, No.1, which belongs to his Black-Form paintings series and to his last career stage. (Fig.6)

Fig.6

At first glance No. 1 is characterized by sharp-edged forms, and a restricted palette. This painting may appear as solid black but for Rothko black was never really black, its a multi-dimensional plane of dark hue. However, after a prolonged contemplation it reveals a slow build-up of multiple layers, gradations, tones and textures from the underneath. Rather than annihilating colour and light, the No. 1 painting gets luminous as the surfaces absorbs and reflects the light and makes the viewer leave behind the first impression of darkness. The central rectangle, with defined edges, has a smooth and high sheen with no colour to differentiate from the out border, the only distinguishing element is this gloss that changes with the angle of light. It seems to be black velvet or silver screen, it modulates from one to other as the light reflects. The reflectivity is the main feature of the Black-Form paintings. Rothko had a very clear purpose with form and colour “The effect is to surround the viewer with massive, imposing visions of darkness.” They were vehicles for an expression of transcendental existence.

8 Rothko’s brushstrokes were fast and light, his method was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with pigment directly onto untreated canvas and to paint thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. He used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants. One of his objectives was to make the layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing of colors, so that that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones. The canvas invites the viewer to look more closely, introducing an element of duration and physical observation into the process of perception. His aim was that the painting could surround the viewer, a notion that became increasingly important to Rothko and others during the late 1950s and 1960s.

9 Conclusion

Based on the main body I can understand the deep meaning of his artwork, his visión, and how his time influenced on his career. I believe Rothko no only wanted to connect with the viewer, he had a strong need to express his mood and concerns. After analyzing No. 1, I get to the conclusion that is not a simple piece of art with two dark rectangles overlaping, it’s a landscape with different dimensions, a mirror in which the viewer sees his soul. In my opinion, Rothko opens through this studied composition a range of invading feelings: lo- neliness, anxiety, sadness ... although it may seem contradictory light it’s still present. This overview of No. 1 and his personality has made me realize that express emotions or feelings without loosing intensity is not an easy task, that the personal life of the artist goes on hand with his work. It has been very inspirational to observe through the research how a spiritual necessity makes the artist develop his own language, trying to be true with himself and at the same time commited with the audience. Pobably for this reason it is considered one of the most important artists of the late 20th century.

10 Bibliography To facilitate the reader the subject of matter the bibliography has been organised as the following:

-Secondary resources Books -Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, (New York: Taschen, 2005) -Black Paintings, Stephanie Rosenthal,(exh. cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2006) -Escritos sobre Arte, (1934-1969), (Madrid: Paidos Ibérica, 2007) -Rothko’s methods revealed. Qui, Jane (London: Nature, 2008) -Rothko, Jacob Baal-Teshuva (New York: Taschen, 2015)

Essays -La muerte del artista moderno: rothko en el umbral de “el fin del arte”, Miriam Paulo, Uni versitá Pompeu Fabra, 2009. -Rothko en fragmentos, Lorena Maza, Universidad de Méjico. -Mark Rothko: Un pintor bajo el umbral de la luz. Antonio Spadaro, La Civilta Cattolica nº 3.780. Universidad de Chile.

Websites -www.tate.org.uk -www.nga.gov -www.metmuseum.org -www.rothkochapel.org -www.moma.org -www.markrothko.org

Interviews -Youtube: Lecture on Mark Rothko an inner world. -Youtube: Kate Rothko, about my father. -Youtube: The Rothko Conspiracy - Suicide & Scams In The Art World. (1983) -Youtube: Rothko’s Rooms (2000)-Mark Rothko Documentary. -Youtube: Mark Rothko-The Art of Conservation.

11 List of illustrations

Abstract Figure 1: Mark Rothko, New York, 1960. Rudy Burckhardt.

Biography Figure 2: No.61 (Rust and Blue) Mark Rothko,1953, 115 cm x 92 cm. Museum of Contem porany Art, Los Angeles. Figure 3: Rothko Chapel, 1973, Houston.

The New York School Figure 4: Nina Leen (photographer), November 24, 1950, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images Front row: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Ro thko; middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne.

Black Form Paintings Figure 5: Rothko in his 69th Street Studio with Rothko Chapel Murals, 1964. Hans Namuth.

No. 1 Figure 6: No. 1, Mark Rothko, 1964. 266’5x203’2cm. National Gallery of Art, Washingon.