Between the Veils – Mark Rothko
Few painters ask as much of the person standing in front of the canvas. A Rothko does not describe anything. It waits, and the longer one stays, the more the colour seems to move: a band of red deepens, a margin of black begins to glow. What follows is a short account of how he arrived there.
He was born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903, in what is now Latvia, and came to America with his family in 1913. New York became his city, and the place where his work would eventually be made and argued over.
The early paintings moved through Surrealism and a measure of Cubism, with figures, myths and city scenes. By the mid-1940s, alongside the painters later grouped as the Abstract Expressionists, he had begun to strip the figure away entirely.
What remained was colour, laid down in soft-edged fields.
Through the late 1940s the forms settled into stacked rectangles. In the 1950s and 1960s they thinned into veils, washes so light that the ground shows through. No. 10 (1950) and Four Darks on Red (1958) belong to this period.
In 1958 he began the Seagram Murals, a cycle of dark maroon and black paintings first meant for a restaurant in the Seagram Building. He withdrew them. The paintings are now held in London and in Japan.
Mark Rothko, ‘Seagram Mural, Section 6 (Untitled)’, 1959. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Rothko believed a painting could take a viewer somewhere beyond the room, and he spoke of his work in terms closer to religion than to design. The fullest statement of that belief is the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a room of fourteen near-black canvases built to be sat in.
He was a perfectionist, and in his last years a deeply unhappy one. He died in 1970.
The paintings now hang at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at Tate Modern in London, among many other collections. They are still best seen slowly, and close to. In his own words: “silence is so accurate.”
( left to right on web, top to down on mobile )
Featured: Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled (Black on Gray)’, 1969-70
Artwork 1: Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled (Red, Orange)’, 1968
Artwork 2: Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled (Green, Blue, Green)’, 1969
Artwork 3: Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange)’, 1955
Please note that the sizes and colors of the artworks may not be accurately represented here. They have been processed for this publication and are cropped from their original dimensions to fit in the frame.
