Word: rothkos
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...There is no such thing," Mark Rothko once said, "as good painting about nothing." Yet if there is a painter alive who appears to be painting nothing, it is Rothko. Line, subject, perspective-all are gone; says Rothko himself: "You have here nothing-but content...
Last week 54 of Rothko's paintings were on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, showing 15 years of the development of a man who is one of the top half-dozen abstract painters in the U.S.-one who has created a personal idiom that pleases the initiated but to the others dramatizes some of the limitations of abstractionism. In canvas after canvas, glowing rectangles of color float over other rectangles. Each canvas is a study in contradiction: everything seems in shimmering motion, but nothing moves at all. The paintings offer windows looking out on blind...
Yale & Starvation. Rothko's father was a Russian Jewish pharmacist who took his family to the U.S. in 1913. Rothko grew up in Portland, Ore., with nary a thought of becoming an artist: he wanted to be a labor leader. He attended Yale, dropped out to ''wander around, bum about, starve a bit." It was not until 1925, when he was 22, that he settled down in Manhattan to attend Max Weber's art classes at the Art Students League. He did not stay long. As a painter, Mark Rothko is almost wholly self-taught...
...search of a style after World War II, the place to be was San Francisco. The California School of Fine Arts, which in the 1930s had brought Diego Rivera to San Francisco, had suddenly burst into life again, this time around two fiery abstract painters, Russian-born Mark Rothko, who was scrubbing canvases with shimmering bands of color, and North Dakota-born Clyfford Still, whose outsize paintings suggested both Western canyons and bark peeled from a tree. Talented younger men (notably Sam Francis and Lawrence Calcagno) spread the Rothko-Still gospel in staccato dab-and-dash across...
Split Coming. Almost as suddenly as it arose, the San Francisco Renaissance split. Still and Rothko departed for the East Coast. Dean of those who remained was Boston-born David Park, and in 1951 he abruptly turned his back on abstract expressionism and won an award in the San Francisco Annual for a painting, Boys on Bicycles, in which the boys were boys, and the wheels were round. "As you grow older," Park said, "it dawns on you that you are yourself-that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want...