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

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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, di- fferent 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 co- lour 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 pain- tings 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 some- thing 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 move- ment, 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 expres- sion 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 4 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 mo- vement 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 crea- ted 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.
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