Rethinking Rothko

The Hay Field- Evening
18 x 24

I've been reading the James Breslin biography of Rothko. I am not sure why I bought it in the first place, but it prompted me to also reread some of my other books about art and artists from that era, and to rethink Rothko. I vividly remember the first day of my first college art history class in 1967 (I was 17 -yikes!). Clement Greenberg was on the reading list and I have had a serious bone to pick with him and just about everyone that followed down that path for the next 30 years. It seemed to me that everything about art that was beautiful, transcendent and lyrical died or at least went on life support during that time. You can definitely put me in "the emperor has no clothes" column when it comes to much of what is called modern or post modern art. I am fully aware this (in much of the art world's opinion) makes me tragically unhip, provincial, narrow ,etc- and I'm OK with that.

However, I also remember the first time I saw a Rothko painting in the Museum of Modern Art in about 1969. I was stopped dead in my tracks. It was big yet quiet, bold yet meditative. And the color seemed to just envelope you. Big surprise to me, I was really moved by it. So, the biography and my collateral reading put some things in context that I had not really grasped at the tender age of 17. By the time I entered college, Rothko and his crowd, had been supplanted by "the next big thing" - Pop Art- and that Pop had swept away not only abstraction, but a rebirth of representational work by artists like Fairfield Porter (also a thoughtful critic and at odds with Greenberg) , Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine and others. So all these years I really should have been pissed at Andy Warhol instead of Jackson Pollock!!??!

But to be honest, I was always willing to grant a dispensation to Rothko. Now, from a distance of many years and seeing how my own work has developed over that time, its not so hard to see why. If Rothko himself is to be believed - and he was often contradictory or in later years, silent about his art- he thought that the purpose of art was to transcend, to transport, to access the best part of our humanity. His paintings are beautiful - full of lush, transparent color, creating indeterminate spaces (fields) that invite us in . They mirror the story of his life, our lives, the human condition-love, loss, courage in the face of despair. He wore his heart on his sleeve, or at least on his canvasses. These paintings are the very antithesis of the formalism of early abstraction or the commercial, hip, smug, snarky, or souless stuff that came next. I think Rothko is perhaps the only abstractionist who was able to make his paintings of nothing truly about something, taking them beyond the merely decorative- which is why viewers respond so strongly to them.

"I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom. If you . . . are moved only by . . . color relationships, then you miss the point."

Mark Rothko

Casey Klahn over at The Colorist posted a video about Rothko's work that I think is particularly moving. Since I can't figure out how to post it here, I'll send you there to see it.