Word: rothkos
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...instead of shooting himself in the gut at 37, he had died full of age and honors in bed. The demand for Jackson Pollock's least scribble might be less fierce if a skidding car had not sent him the way of James Dean. And what of Mark Rothko, who killed himself with a razor and pills in 1970? In hindsight, death appeared to be the central image of Rothko's late, dark, claustrophobic canvases. Indeed, his suicide gave his art a simplified legibility that it did not really have? the operatic wholeness of art and life that a myth...
Last week the largest retrospective of Mark Rothko's paintings went on view in Manhattan. Organized by Art Historian Diane Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum, it will travel later to Houston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. It consists of almost 200 paintings, spanning a career of more than 40 years. They run from his first tentative exercises in the manner of Milton Avery, his mentor, whose soft, vibrating patches of color had an indelible effect on Rothko; thence to the curious, stilted subway scenes of the 1930s, and to the totemic abstracts of vaguely identifiable figures-in-landscape which were...
...Bauhaus-constructivist line meant little to them. Surrealism, however, was more congenial. To begin with, it was an art of subject matter; and although platoons of later critics would discuss abstract expressionism in purely formalist terms, the painters themselves were obsessed by content. "We assert," said Mark Rothko, "that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." His "we" included Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Theodores Stamos and, in greater or lesser degrees, all the abstract expressionists with the possible exception of de Kooning...
...deeply felt but homeless (and culturally impossible) totemism. Some, like Pollock, drew direct inspiration from Southwest Indian art, transforming it-as in The Key, 1946-into the congested, baroque rhetoric of shape which would later be refined as the allover skeins and webs of his drip paintings. Still and Rothko regarded their art as mediumistic: it was, Still declared, a way of "being with in a revelation," and this kind of priestly bombast was a regular feature of abstract expressionist utterances. Painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth...
...hindsight, one can easily see where they got their language: how Gorky's spidery, fluent line emerged from Miro, how the bulging shapes of early de Kooning derive from '30s Picasso, what Rothko got from Max Ernst and Pollock from Kandinsky, and how deeply Adolph Gottlieb's pictographs were influenced by Victor Brauner. But that is perhaps of secondary importance. What counts most in this show is the spectacle of those obscure but desperately committed artists painting as though art had the power to change life, as though culture itself depended on their efforts: which...