Word: rothkos
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...broke his truce between surrealism and abstraction. Preoccupied with "tragic and timeless" subject matter, Rothko wanted to invest the entire surface of the painting with a sense of awe, a ritualistic presence; and in groping toward this he produced some of the least satisfactory paintings of his career?vague, disconnected blots and blurs, pretty as begonias, but otherwise unremarkable. But gradually the patches coalesced, the structure firmed. His breakthrough came in 1949, with a painting named Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red, which created the formula he would explore (with variations) for the last 20 years...
...unassuageable sense of not belonging, his self-pity and his addiction to booze and pills, is veiled behind the ceremonial diction of the catalogue?as he would have wished, perhaps. It is a moving exhibition, and not the least moving thing about it is its sense of failure. Rothko set himself goals which he could not meet, and he made demands on his art which no younger painters wanted to take up in emulation...
...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...