Word: rothko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ancestors, and I know myself best by my gestures, meanings...not through a study of my family tree." To a great extent he succeeded. Virtually no modernist paintings done before 1945 look like his work, and even the influence of surrealism, a vital catalyst for Pollock and Rothko, is less apparent in Still than anywhere else in abstract expressionism. Instead of going by fits and starts, testing and absorbing other art, Still's career gives the impression of monolithic solidity: he found his style early and stuck to it for more than 30 years. No other artist living today...
...look tenuous indeed. In this changed context, it is the figures and their mood, rather than their surrounding artifacts, that one notices first; and they connect to an older realist tradition, far from the self-consciousness and media-play of Pop. They resemble, as the late Mark Rothko once said, "walk-in Hoppers," sculptural equivalents to the world of that American master, with its nocturnal bars and waiting figures. Segal's tableaux have a flavor of the '30s-overlaid, now and then, with a sharp erotic curiosity. Instead of the irony of a '60s Warhol or Lichtenstein...
...Rothko was not only a Jew, but a Russian. Though his parents took him from czarist Russia to America in 1913 when he was only ten, his origins were of immense significance to his art. He treated painting with the moral seriousness that Russians traditionally assigned to music or the novel. By art, he hoped, one is set free. The only art that could provide a model for life was the sublime. In that sense, Rothko was the last romantic painter, the heir to Turner or Caspar David Friedrich...
...inherit is nothing; what counts is what an artist does with his legacy. The problems raised by Rothko's august aims were taxing. He lived in the wrong time and place. His ambition was rabbinical. He wanted to be a major religious artist, not a dealer's monk: to produce overwhelming images of transcendence and numinosity?the light of heaven, as it were, without the attendant saints and angels. But the images had no cultural environment to reinforce them. Rothko always protested against a narrowly aesthetic response to his work, but tie was addressing an audience of aesthetes, not true...
...grainy opacity of stone, sometimes it is no more than a puff, a vapor with color bleeding through it. It is never crude and only rarely inert. In this way a most sonorous pictorial eloquence is placed at the service of incommunicable feelings, and the sad facts of Rothko's life rush in to complete the missing subject matter. In a sense, the late works are declarations of the impotence of painting: it could not blot up enough anguish, or take the burden of existence away from the artist. The Black Hole expanded to fill the canvas, but no surface...