Word: rothkos
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Boston Bourbon & Saliva Sir: The piece on Painter Mark Rothko in TIME was terrific! "Yet if there is a painter alive who appears to be painting nothing, it is Rothko !" You said it, man-nothing ! You'd better check your art department-I've a hunch someone may be putting bourbon in the water cooler...
...Navy, John Hultberg in 1947 enrolled in San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts, and it seemed that artistically there was only one course for him to steer. Abstractionism was the powerful new movement, and some of its most famous practitioners-notably Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko-were his teachers. Hultberg has nothing but admiration for these men-but purely abstract painting...
...began as a realist ("That was what we inherited"), passed through a stage that was "allied to surrealism," finally went wholly abstract. By 1947 he was already turning out compositions of floating colors. In the years since, Rothko has achieved an almost elemental simplicity, which he likes to explain in more complicated fashion. ''In our inheritance we have space, a box in which things are going on," he says. "In my work there is no box; I do not work with space. There is a form without the box, and possibly a more convincing kind of form...
Rembrandt's a Noun. Rothko worries a good deal about the notion of image. " 'Rembrandt' has become a noun," says he, "a noun that conjures up a particular kind of painting. 'Rembrandt' has become an image." So, indeed, in a smaller way has Rothko, and this automatically places a limit on his striving toward the limitless. To Rothko, almost everything depends on the viewer's being able to approach a painting as a pure and unique experience, for which he should not be prepared. The impact of color, the electric shimmer of an edge...
...much flight can a viewer get? Even on Rothko's own terms, his image, once seen, is only too recognizable in the next painting, and the essential innocence of the viewer is destroyed. The spell is there - it simply does not last...