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Duration: 10:00 minutes Upload Time: 2007-10-12 08:47:17 User: ariakokoschka :::: Favorites :::: Top Videos of Day |
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Art AbstractExperssionism Surrealism Tragedy UniversalTruth CollectivePsychology MarkRothko Rothko Painting Emotions
Description: Born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia) Rothko moved with his family to Portland, Oregon in 1913. His painting education was brief - he moved to New York to study under the artist Max Weber and then struck out on his own. Rothko is known for his abstract expressionism paintings, but he moved through more traditional styles in his early career, including Surrealist paintings in the 1940s. In 1947 he embarked on the first of his large abstract 'colour-field' paintings, formalising their structure further in the 1950s. Rothko had huge success with largescale solo shows. He committed suicide in 1970. Mark Rothko was found on the morning of February 25 1970, lying dead in a wine-dark sea of his own blood. He had cut very deep into his arms at the elbow, and the pool emanating from him on the floor of his studio measured 8ft x 6ft. That is, it was on the scale of his paintings. It was, to borrow the art critical language of the time, a colour field. Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I wasn't sure where that was and whether I wanted to go. I only know I had no choice and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic, but I got it all wrong that morning in 1970. I thought a visit to the Seagram Paintings would be like a trip to the cemetary of abstraction - all dutiful reverence, a dead end. Mark Rothko's conception of his art and its general reception seem to have little in common. He did not set out to create a contemplative environment or an aesthetic experience but wanted to engulf the viewer in a world of tragic myth and universal human drama. The viewer should experience dramatic emotion in front of his paintings, as Rothko explicitly stated: "If you... are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" "I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in relationships of color or forms... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions -- tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on -- and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." The meaning and scope of Rothko's art changed little over the course of his career and, while there are few clues in the mature works to help the viewer tease out his intentions, an examination of his early paintings reveals the themes that occupied the artist for his entire life. As a young man Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche's 1871 history of Greek tragedy, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC, which argued that Greek tragedy and tragic myth represent universal human truths that are infinite and eternal. Nietzsche's idea that art should dramatize the terror and struggles of existence supported Rothko's conception of the artist as the modern mythmaker whose works reflect the course of the human spirit in all its aspirations and vicissitudes. Nietzsche's view of antiquity was far removed from the romanticized version of previous generations, revolving instead around the chaos of the archaic world. It is this concept of antiquity -- mysterious, powerful and ominous -- that Rothko adopted. During a 1943 radio broadcast, Rothko discussed his belief in a collective psychology that is based in antiquity and expressed in mythology. Such myths, he argued, expressed the fundamentals of human experience, whatever their topical differences: "If [the] titles [of my paintings] recall the known myths of antiquity... [I] have used them because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance... and modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life." Rothko introduced Surrealist elements into his works before abandoning the figural altogether around 1949. From 1950 his allusions to universal truths and collective identity became even more generalized, expressed by the most basic of compositional arrangements and abstracted motifs. The earlier themes are still present, however, and can be seen in the rectangular color fields that echo the earlier horizontal bands. The viewer is engulfed in Rothko's later works much as the early figures were dominated by their segmented environments. As the artist said of his own paintings: "You are in it. It isn't something you command." |
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