ecopolis

Mark Rothko, No. 301 [Red and Blue over Red], 1959 – Moca Permanent Collection

During a study trip in the United States in the 1950’s I frequented the lively artistic scene that met at the Cedar Bar in Manhattan, where one often ran into de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Stamos, Gottlieb and Lichtenstein. I had never met Rothko however, of whom I had heard a great deal following his exhibition entitled 15 Americans, curated by Dorothy Miller, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.

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A mutual friend happened to arrange for me to visit the artist’s studio, which, if I remember correctly, was on West 53rd Street. When I looked at the enormous canvas that Rothko had “unrolled” from its support (a kind of wooden cylinder), it was like a “revelation”: the gleaming luminous colours that covered the vast surface and faded from yellow to orange to red, and the oils (this was prior to the period in which he worked with acrylic) which were applied to create a continuity without any sharply-defined edges, immediately won my admiration. There were none of Pollock’s tangles or dripping, none of de Kooning’s complex and distorted figuration (his famous Women series), but there was, in a certain sense, a “return” to pure painting but, at the same time, Rothko achieved absolute abstraction

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I immediately thought of Goethe’s well-known definition in his Farbenlehre, concerning the “sinnlichsittliche Natur der Farben” in painting that “aus der Farbe heaus” (which I referred to in a text of 1958). Namely the “ethical”, and hence sensorial, but also “moral” quality that makes colour the protagonist of an artistic creation that is not removed from the reality of the world, indeed, it is directly linked to one’s own “cenesthesis”, to one’s own inner self.

Fifty years have passed since then and in the meantime, Rothko – who was almost unknown in the late fifties – has been rightly recognised as one of the most representative artists of his generation (possibly the most representative, the least influenced by informal trends and the first signs of pop art, and the most faithful to painting in which chromatic intensity was the true aim of each work).

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It was the explosive “tonalism” of colour that struck me most clearly then(I later had a different reaction to the series in the Beyeler Collection). The fundamental distinction between “timbric” and “tonal” colour (noted by Herbert Read), was embodied to the full in these works by Rothko. In fact, the same tonal quality of colour was already evident in his series of “surreal” paintings (such as the famous Tiresias of 1944 or Rites of Lilith of 1945), which were still marked by a figurativeness, albeit very distorted and antinaturalistic.

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I believe that Rothko – apart from his exceptional ethical quality and his independence from pashion and trends – was one of the most individual and inspired personalities of the last century. This is yet further evidence of how, once again, it was the “ethical-aesthetic maturity” of Old Europe (which manifested as a pronounced Jewish-Russian sensibility in Rothko) that actually gave fruit to the major artistic currents of the twentieth century.

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Perhaps the diverse conditions in which the artist found himself and the existential problems he experienced during his last years were responsible for this undeniable chromatic metamorphosis: from brilliant reds, oranges and yellows, we witnessed a descent into hell with blue-green, grey and even black, when the sublime “cosmic” quality of his work had been suffocated and darkened by the rigours of everyday life.

Excerpts from : A Song without Words . . . An Encounter with Mark Rothko by Gillo Dorfles

curated by Oliver Wick

The works on display have been lent by leading international museums: Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Tate, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv.

Information : www.rothko.it, Email: rothko@arthemisia.it