068 ROTHKO
Right
Mark Rothko, Self Portrait, 1936.
Oil on canvas. 81.9 x 65.4 cm.
Collection of Christopher Rothko
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023
‘Few artists
have been more
obsessive...in their insistence on precisely how their
pictures were to be hung, illuminated or viewed’
ultimate truth and boundless wisdom, containing the seeds of profundity, of infinity and the rudiments of Paradise. But then, if Proust was right, and the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost, then to view these paintings is a privilege. Tere is unlikely to be another chance to see such an assembly of Rothko’s paradise. Ever.
He was a Latvian Jew, Marcus Rotkovitch, born in 1903 in Dvinsk, a trading hub of 75,000 inhabitants within the Pale of Settlement, now renamed Daugavpils. He wanted to be a great religious artist. Today, it is not easy to engage with him as a religious painter, whilst one has to admit that whatever it is which takes place between viewer and picture has a spiritual dimension. ‘We assert,’ he stated in the 1940s, ‘that the subject matter is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.’ After which he produced anguished luminous incandescent blurs in an endless stream of production. Tere was nothing but colour, but what diaphanous stains of colours they were, awe-inspiring wash upon wash of thinned pigment. Any interpretation is left to us.
Whatever you make of it all this, the FLV exhibition is a milestone; a blockbuster if ever there was one, one that fills the entire building,
culminating in a quite remarkable display that derives from an unrealised project, a 30 sq m mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. It was to have paired Rothko and Giacometti. How much one meant to the other is unclear, but the connections were never more evident: the anxiety is there, the hieratic stillness, haunting, tragic, vulnerable, extreme, two great artists of existential austerity, the monomaniacs of modern art, not distracted by success or failure, together at last, lost in space yet dominating it, perpetuating the transient. What a finale to any show! Rothko ultimately turned down the commission but continued to work on the series for the final two years of his life, an aesthetic step beyond abstract expressionism and a harbinger of minimalism. Both Rothko and Giacometti had problems with figuration to which Picasso replied, ‘in the first place there isn’t any solution, there never is a solution, and that’s as it should be’. In 1958 Rothko had explained that although he belonged ‘to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure’, and although it was something he studied, he found ‘with the utmost reluctance’ that it did not meet his needs. ‘Whoever used it mutilated it. No one could paint the figure as it was and feel that he could produce something that
could express the world. I refuse to mutilate and had to find another way of expression.’ Here there are faces in the crowd on the subway that most art students today would never recognise as by Rothko, there are great swathes of vivid colour to counteract the severity and melancholy of the famous dark work from the 1960s, and then there is the UNESCO project to transport you to what might have been.
Few artists have been more obsessive, more imperious, more awkward in their insistence on precisely how their pictures were to be hung, illuminated or viewed. It is a bitter irony that although the artist was obsessive about protecting the physical integrity of his works and trying to control the conditions under which they would be seen, a number of them have been severely compromised by his use of poor materials and by the inadequate care of those who owned them. Here by contrast, everything looks magnificent, and agreeably overwhelming. As Rothko phrased it, ‘A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an Experience.’ Tis exhibition is certainly that, compelling and comprehensive. Go if you possibly can. Looking at Rothko is a great antidote to reading about Rothko. Te show is on until 2 April 2024.
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