Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko , born Marcus Rothkowitzen with Daugavpils (Russia) on September 25th 1903 and dead on February 25th 1970, is an American painter, belonging to the artists of the abstract Expressionnisme American - even if he refused this alienating categorization of abstract painter.

Biography

He is of Jewish origin , born Marcus Rothkowitz with Daugavpils (Dvinsk), Russia in 1903, he emigrates with his mother and his sister with Portland (Oregon) in 1913 to join his father and his brothers there. He makes his studies with the Lincoln High School of Portland cement, then at the university of Yale. In 1929, he becomes professor of drawing for children, Marie in 1932 with Edith Sachar then is based, in 1934, the Artist Union of New York. It is in addition only in 1940 that it will adopt the americanized name of Mark Rothko, two years after having taken American nationality. According to his friends it was of a difficult naturalness, deeply anxious and irascible, but in spite of that it could also be full with devotion and affection. It is truly in the Années 1950 that its career starts, in particular thanks to the collector Duncan Philips which buys several paintings to him, and, after a long voyage of the painter in Europe, a whole room of its collection devotes to him (dream of Rothko which wished that the visitors not be disturbed by other works). The Années 1960 will be for him the period of the great public orders (Université of Harvard, Marlborough Gallery of London, vault with Houston) and of the development of its ideas on painting. But this creative dash and of recognition will be stopped by the disease, an aneurism of the aorta handicapping which will prevent it from painting large sizes. Mark Rothko will commit suicide in 1970.

Work

Rothko was an intellectual, an extremely cultivated man who liked the music and the literature and was very interested by philosophy, in particular in the writings of Nietzche and Greek mythology. Influenced by the work of Henri Matisse - to which it devoted besides a homage in one of its fabrics - Rothko occupies a singular place within the Ecole of New York. After tested Expressionnisme abstract, (artistic movement in which it will cotoiera in particular Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb), the Surréalisme, it develops at the end of the Années 1940 a new way of painting. Indeed, hostile with the expressionnism of the Action Painting, Mark Rothko (like Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still) invents a new way, méditative, to paint, that the critic Clement Greenberg will define as the Colorfield Painting made up of “coloured fields”.

In its fabrics, it is expressed exclusively by the means of the color which it poses on the fabric in flat tints on undecided board, on the moving surfaces, sometimes monochromic and sometimes made up of variously coloured bands. It reaches a particularly significant spiritual dimension thus.

Artistic maturity

Rothko separates from his wife Edith Sachar during the summer 1937 following the success of Edith in her businesses of jewelry. Apparently, it did not take pleasure to work with his wife and would have felt threatened and jealous of its financial success. Edith and it are reconciled in autumn, but their reports/ratios remain tended. February 21st, 1938, Rothko obtains American nationality, encouraged by its fears that the influence increasing Nazie in Europe can cause the sudden deportation of the American Jews. The appearance of sympathies Nazis in the United States increases its fears; in January 1940, Marcus Rothkovich changes its name into Mark Rothko, the common abbreviation “Roth” being identified like Jewish. After the pact germano-Soviet between Hitler and Stalin in 1939, Rothko, Avery, Gottlieb and others, leave the Congrès of the American artists in sign of protest against the bringing together of the congress with radical Communism. In June, it forms with other artists the Fédération of the modern painters and sculptors . Their objective is to maintain art free from political propaganda.

Mythological inspiration

Fearing that American modern painting reached a dead end, Rothko is attentive with the exploration of subjects different from the natural and urban scenes; subjects which would supplement its increasing concern of the Forme, the Spacialité and the Couleur. The world-wide crisis of the war lends to this research an immediacy - an urgency - just as its insistence to find new topics having a social impact, able to transcend the limits of the values and symbols political. In its important test, The Romantics Were Prompted published in 1949, Rothko observes that “the antiquated artist (...) finds with respect to the gods and demigods, the need for creating a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids. ” in a way similar to the modern man finding of the intermediaries in the communist party Fascism or .

However, the existence of the modern man misses urgency of its primitive counterparts. Because of the discoveries, imperialism and scientific projections of Europe, the traditional bonds eroded and the Mythologie was called in question; consequently old mythologies (based on the social one) would have been replaced by the Individu. For Rothko, “without monsters nor gods, art cannot appear a drama” and “when they were abandoned like intolerable superstitions, art fell into the melancholy”. Consequently, the “great achievements” of civilizations which accepted the improbability of the myth “are those of the solitary human figure in one moment of complete immobility” able “to indicate its concern of the moral principle and an insatiable appetite for an omnipresent experiment of this principle. ”, in the idea that each one, released of the gods and the monsters, could be able “to breathe and to stretch its arm towards the other”. This human figure only in a moment of immobility supplements was used as prototype with last paintings of Rothko: singular style of its fields irradiating of color, recluses but as much related to the transcendent images of mythology.

The use by Rothko of mythology as comment of the current history was by no means an innovation. Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman read and discussed work of Freud and Jung, in particular their respective theories in connection with the dreams and of the prototypes of the unconscious collective, and considered the mythological symbols as images car-referring - operative in a space of human conscience which transcends the specific stories and cultures. Consequently, of the images of Greece torn by the war antiques would have a similar impact (if not superior) with a newspaper cutting presenting London torn by the war, on first page of Sunday Times.

Independently of the knowledge of the modern man of the mythological symbols, these images would speak directly with the Inconscient jungien and would awake the energies hidden at the man, the tonic on the surface. Rothko explained later why its artistic approach “was reformed” by its study of the “dramatic topics of the myth. ” It apparently ceased painting during all the year 1940, and studied the interpretation of the dreams of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the gold branch of the anthropologist James George Frazer.

Inspiration nietzschéenne

However the most crucial book for Rothko during this time would be the Birth of the tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The new vision of Rothko would thus test asresser with the requirements of the spirituality of the modern man and with the mythological creative requirements, with identical of protesting Nietzsche that the Greek Tragédie is a human research to repurchase terrors of a life mortal. The modern artistic objectives ceased being the goal of Rothko. As from this moment there, its art would support as a final goal, the burden to relieve the fundamental spiritual vacuum of the modern man; a vacuum created partly by the absence of a mythology addressed correctly to “the growth of a childish spirit and (...) to the life and the fights of a man” and to provide the esthetic recognition necessary to the release of the unconscious energies, previously released by the mythological images, symbols and ritual.

Rothko regarded itself as a “maker of myth” and proclaimed that the only subject validates was that which is tragic. “The perked up tragic experiment” it wrote, “is for me the only source of Article”.

Its dimension

In November 1999, one of its fabrics of 1952 was sold for the sum of 10,215 million euros.

Quotations

“ It is a very widespread idea among the painters that the subject imports little since it is well painted. Such is the gasoline of the academism. It is not true that one can make a good painting in connection with nothing. We affirm that the subject is essential and that the only subject which is worth the sorrow is the tragedy and the eternal. For this reason we assert a spiritual affinity with the primitive art and antiquated. ”
“ art always conceals evocations of the condition mortal. ”
“ I realize that historically, the finality of the large tables answers the idea to do something of completely imposing and majestic. The reason which pushes me to make some, however - I believe that it applies to other painters whom I know - is precisely that I want to remain very intimate, and human. To make a small table, it is to place themselves apart from its own experience, to contemplate an experiment as in a stereoscopic effect projector or glass which reduces. (...) Whatever the way of painting a large painting, one is inside. It is not something which is ordered.

“… I cuts never thought that painting has picture has anything to C with coil-expression. It has communication butt the world to someone else. After the world is convinced butt this communication, it exchanges. The world was never the same after Picasso gold Miro. Theirs has view off the world which transformed our vision off things. All teaching butt coil-expression is erroneous in art; it has to C with therapy. ””

THE RECIPE OFF HAS WORK OFF ART - ITS INGREDIENTS - HOW TO MAKE IT - THE FORMULATED:

1. There must Be has clear concern with death - intimations off mortality… Tragic art, romantic art, etc, deals with the knowledge off death. 2. Sensuality. Concrete Our basis off being butt the world. It has lustful relationship to things that exist. 3. Tension. Either conflict desired gold curbed. 4. Irony. This has modern ingredient - the coil-obliteration and examination by which has man for urgent year edge go one to something else. 5. Wit and play… for the human element. 6. The ephemeral and chance… for the human element. 7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

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