Word: rothkos
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Ambassadorial Mission. The two major omissions from his impressive roster (see box) are Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, neither of whom likes to be shown with other artists. Otherwise, the collection is as comprehensive a view of American art today as can be found. It ranges in style from Edward Hopper's clean-limned piece of Americana, done in 1960, to an eerie "combine" by Robert Rauschenberg. A shimmering forest scene by Charles Burchfield complements a Sam Francis abstraction showing swirls of blue dancing a quadrille across the canvas. The great precisionist Charles Sheeler, usually associated with geometric views...
...arrival at the school of Clyttord Still and later Mark Rothko were the catalysts in this conversion, but Park himself was already concerned with "big abstract ideals like vitality, energy, profundity warmth." His own abstractions, as his 'friend, Painter Elmer Bischoff, describes them, were "goopy, sensuous arrangements of forms," but ironically, Park never found in goopiness the freedom that other artists did. Instead of losing himself in his work, he became overly concerned with style and technique. "I was artificially putting together forms," he said. And so in 1950, Park painted a figurative picture called Kids on Bikes...
Back at the Ranch. The West Side apartment of Textile Manufacturer Benjamin Heller strikes some as an art gallery with a bed. Huge paintings by Pollock, Rothko. Newman and other abstractionists, as well as Greek and African sculptures and pre-Columbian potteries, loom everywhere-in the living room and kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Because action painters feel a compulsion to paint big, Heller kept the apartment free of cornices, architectural decoration and ornamental bric-a-brac whose fussy detail would clash with the large-scale paintings. But, insists Collector Heller, "the idea that our apartment was built around...
...abstract because they cannot paint images. Esteban Vicente's portrait of his little daughter and the early sculptured heads by Sculptors Reuben Nakian and Louise Nevelson prove that these artists could have successfully stuck to representation had they chosen to. Other early works are not so reassuring. Mark Rothko's floating rectangles, controversial though they are, at least have an air of mystery, and many admirers have fallen under their spell. Had Rothko stuck to realism, as in his Two Women in a Window, his name might not even be known today...
...Bauhaus did--in terms of unity, it is hard to imagine how the museum's directors could ignore an opportunity to show, among other things, how Kandinsky's abstract expressionism has led to such things as Jackson Pollack's dribblings, how Moholy-Nagy's geometry has led to Mark Rothko's squares within squares, and, most important of all, how the Bauhaus attempt to unify the visual arts has led to widespread acceptance of what now is called "environmental architecture"--the attempt to enlarge the artist's realm beyond the single painting or building, to include the total physical environment...