C/D: Mark Rothko

Franz Kline is underrated but that's another thread.

http://www.thecityreview.com/rothko3.gif

http://www.a-art-webdesign.de/design_galerie/images/rothko2.jpg

http://a1259.g.akamai.net/f/1259/5586/1d/images.art.com/images/PRODUCTS/large/10009000/10009294

Admittedly, there's something strangely linear about his work, to the point where even the stuff I really like is tempered by this vague frustration wherein I can understand how I might not like it in a year's time...

One friend says: "No soul."

C, by the way, and for many of the same reasons as Monet.

But VERY IMPORTANT: art prints != paintings. mark p's friends can be utterly correct about the Ikea prints while being completely off the money about the paintings.

My negative reaction to seeing Rothko work, whether as poster or in museums, has much less to do with the work itself than it does with the Rothko's spiritual intentions for the work. When artwork is created with formal intentions, an epiphany can arise from the result. When the intention is an epiphany, it's too self-important to really have an effect on me. Purely formal painting, while it comes with its own pretensions, at least ultimately acknowledges that it's just painting.

On the other hand, James Turrell and Agnes Martin have the same spiritual ambitions, and I'll gladly travel to see their pieces. Maybe I just find them more formally satisfying?

Since that is exactly how I want (almost) every interaction with art I don't get or like to go, for me, Rothko = Classic.

What'd he say?

Yay, Marie.

i onced used mark rothko to explain to my parents why i liked techno-they were saying about how it all sounds the same and is just repetition,and didn't see how anyone could like that...i pointed out that the same could be said for rothko,that they're all pretty much the same and the enjoyment comes from the subtle changes in colours and shades (beats and sounds)
i don't think they'll be rushing out and buying live at the liquid room any time soon,but i think the analogy helped explain my point of view at the time...

Basically they seemed like cold experiments in color to me, a bit academic and not actually all that revealing w/r/t color, I thought, but he remarked (as we passed by one in the MoMA) that he found it "devastating". So, since he wasn't really the sort to be devastated lightly, I asked him what why, and he said -- ach, I am totally going to phrase this horribly, but then again it was about 10 years ago and we were teenagers so I'm sure it wasn't that profound -- something about the colors being so pathetic (in the, um, "pathos" sense of the word) and they way they wash out into each other. And I realized that I hadn't been paying enough attention to the sorts of colors they were nor the way they were, um, poised and that this wasn't really the muddled op art I was seeing it as (or, perhaps, it was but aiming for a very different effect).

Something like that. It seems shallow typing it out (though maybe that isn't such a bad thing). I haven't seen a Rothko in person in years, mind you.

I have listened to Feldman's "Rothko Chapel", but I don't love it as much as some of Feldman's other pieces, so I can't even say anything interesting about that.

I went to the Retrospective at Hamburg's Kunsthalle yesterday, and it was mind blowingly, heart breakingly beautiful. If you only have half a chance to go there: GO.

My first experience of Rothko was on a school trip to the Tate Gallery. Just before we went into the Rothko room, our teacher said "I used to really hate Rothko's pictures, but now I really like them". Then we went in. We were all 11/12 years old BTW. Our reaction was basically "WTF is this shit?!!?"

Tate Modern are doing an exhibition from the end of September.

(xpost) Just to clarify a bit, the room was all the "black on maroon" stuff. This was also the same year as the controversy over the "pile of bricks" piece.

I've only seen one real live Rothko, at the SFMOMA...standing in front of it, and I apologise if this sounds weepy or sentimental, but it honestly made me feel like a child looking up at the night sky. To me, the definitition of sublime, where it's just too much for your brain to handle all at once. Which on paper sounds dumb because it's just blocks of color on canvas...but the shades, the depth...it made me gasp. The reprints in art books or whatever never did him justice compared to what I saw that day.

that's not dumb at all, I think it's a pretty good description of how I feel about some Rothko

if you mean the piece with the sorta burgundy/orange/eggplant color scheme, vegemitegrrl, i had pretty much the same reaction so yr not alone

I imagine if I saw one in person I'd be impressed, overwhelmed, awe-struck, etc. But generally, small-scale, his stuff looks a bit like what you'd buy a triptych of on little square canvases in Next to hang in the guest bedroom. Which is obviously not his fault in the slightest, but that association is in my head now.

i used to feel that way too, but seeing one in person really makes all the difference.

it was the same with renoir for me — didn't like him before i saw his stuff in person, then i *understood*.

A room full is even better. When I first saw the Rothko room in the old Tate I felt like VegemiteGrrrl above. It was amazing.

And might I add, fuck the telegraph for making a lol-modern-art-who-knows-which-way-it-should-be-hung-story out of what looks like an amazing exhibition.

Thing is it DOES look stupid like that -- like the fucking twin towers or something.

a lot of the drawings in that exhibition show that twin tower scheme iirc

I didn't see that at all. Either I am too immersed in my love of Rothko or I am becoming immune to seeing the twin towers everywhere. Or both.

seeing one in person really makes all the difference.

aye. i didn't feel like i got him until i saw an exhibition in d.c. about 10-12 years ago. obv all painters should be seen in the original, but he's one where i think it's hard to even approximate the experience in a reproduction. not just the size, tho that's crucial, but also the tactile presence of the paint itself.

Houston has its flaws, but it also has this:

http://www.houstonmuseumdistrict.org/default/images/Rothko%2002.tif%20for%20emailing.jpg

I've visited perhaps a dozen times over my life, and I'm not sure whether whether I love it for the paintings or just the architecture (the outside, however, is hideous). At the front table are several dozen religious texts, and you can sit on one of the benches in an eerie silence, usually alone, curled up with yer Tibetan Book of the Dead or Bhagavad Gita etc until another patron arrives and you feel awkwardly like part of the exhibit.

(the outside, however, is hideous).

Got to take issue with you there. Like this building a lot.

What's weird about the decision to hang the pictures wrong--which can only be intentional on the part of the curators-- is that it essentially flies in the face of practically ALL of the rest of Rothko's work, which is typically vertical canvases with squares or horizontal rectangles within the composition.

The show at the Tate is pretty spot on especially after that awful Cy Twombly thing they had last time I was there. The ones with the grey-brown horizon-lines were beaufiul, how some looked cold and glacial some looked expansively lunar and other looked claustrophobically dark and they were all essentially the same painting, I don't know that you would be able to pick one from another even in a really good repro, but in person they were so autonomous.

The outside of the Rothko Chapel:

http://www.bluffton.edu/%7Esullivanm/texas/houston/rothko/front.jpg

I think what bugs me most about the exterior is that its got the structure and shape of a lot of vandalism resistant public schools built in the 70s/80s, like my own, and the very same brick facade. Philip Johnson can do better, as in the other chapel he built at the site, the Chapel of St. Basil:

http://z.hubpages.com/u/31838_f520.jpg

I have to say I prefer the Rothko chapel, but I'm a fan of bricks and not faffing with facades.

The Telegraph (as might be expected is being, at the very least, disingenuous when it says the Tate couldn't be reached for comment.
Letter from the Tate's Director to The Guardian

Based on that letter I could see the curator(s) hanging them as such just to see what it would look like--why not? There's little backlash, and rare is the opportunity to directly affect the way the painting is perceived.

yeah the Seagram mural is the focal point of the exhibition too, so the decision makes even more sense in that context.

i saw the huge retrospective show at the (US) national gallery of art back in ... 1998?

so just to add on to what people are saying, yes, the actual paintings are much bigger than you think (i recall most of them being bigger than me), and yes, that makes a lot of difference.

another thing that people haven't pointed out is that a lot of them are meant to be looked at in the dark. the lights in the nat'l gallery were dimmed for the show, and in the half-light the paintings are incredibly luminous and moving. when i got home to my brightly-lit room and looked at my 3 x 5 rothko print ("brown, blue, brown on blue") it was enough to make me take it down.

this is maybe a rockist and snobbish sentiment and possibly also off-topic, but in regards to what people said upthread about art prints and decor, you really do have to wonder sometimes about the popularity of certain artists among people who've almost certainly never seen the work in person. though i guess you could make the same argument about the mona lisa.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A4nmvn-CQAAhXRI.jpg

What a dick.

Have you looked at his website? Complete Nathan Barley wank fantasy.

read the website for a bit... god, what a fucking cunt.

wait what?

oh i see

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121007/eu-britain-rothko-defaced/

:(

what a tosser http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/oct/08/defaced-tate-modern-rothko?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

omg how is it possible for someone to think doing this is an original or interesting idea unless they are 15 and literally just discovered duchamp

for my next trick i will write "this is not a can of soup" on a warhol

Duchamp didn't attack other artists' work.

there's an unresolved knot around the money value of an artwork and its status as post-religious icon and its status as work of an artist that still wraps around Art as an establishment or a public discourse

but this kind of gesture - buffoon refers to the "value" of the painting in strictly the 1st sense tho he seems to want to believe he's refering to the 2nd and 3rd - can only be read as egocentricity curdled to stalking, the equivalent of shooting a celebrity because the shooter wants to become famous themselves

yah but this whole line of thinking naturally extends from duchamp imo

didn't some jackhole piss in his toilet many years ago? and then said "duchamp would think i'm fucking rad". this is that.

jackhole was one B. Eno allegedly

i can see how this cd descend in a line from Duchamp but i get the feeling assholes who do this then refer to him haven't read anything he said about readymades, he was doing creation not nihilism imo

not even going that far tho, just the simple idea of taking something that's already there and claiming it as art (your art)

like i think it's natural and common for teenagers just learning about readymades on wiki to think "well what's to stop me from just taking duchamp's found shit and saying i found it! ha! i am appreciating art! duchamp would see what i have done and look on like a proud father!"

i'm going to a wedding at the rothko chapel in a couple of weeks!

looked at the website of those tools -- nothing even remotely interesting about their work

2 years in jail for that one guy btw

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/12/13/1355403772903/Wlodzimierz-Umaniec-010.jpg

Mark Rothko Tate Modern painting damage man jailed

we have a thread for this fyi

for some reason this guy annoys me more than the guy who defaced guernica all those years ago

i guess by "some reason" i mean his face

The Guernica guy's reasoning was daft but it had a motivation bigger than witless self-aggrandizement, i suppose.

lol strongo

wtf man he did it for yellowism

two years seems pretty steep for vandalism.

I'd punch this fucker if I didn't think he'd immediately go and write a blog post about it.

Lost in the high street, where the dogs run
roaming suburban boys
Mother's got her hairdo to be done
She says they're too old for toys
Stood by a Rothko with a felt pen
in this suburban hell
and in the distance a police car
to break the suburban spell

Two years seems pretty fucking fair to me. He'll be out sooner than that if he doesn't behave like a knob oh wait...

Review of the giant Rothko exhibition at France

I got to see a whole gallery's worth of his super dark paintings once, and another, more varied show. Both were fantastic but the black paintings felt like my blood was draining out of my body. It was like someone had tripled the gravity in the room.

And I agree with John at the beginning of the thread — Kline is incredible. Buying a Kline is near the top of my "if I ever win the lottery" list.

Went to see the exhibition the other day in Paris. As said many times, seeing the painting is definitely different from one of the thousands of posters I'd seen. The lighting was also amazing, with the rooms kept in semi-darkness bar for the paintings. And yet... I have to say that I got a bit bored half way through, as if there were only so many variations I could engage with.

The Rothko Room at the Philips Collection in DC has different paintings in it for the first time ever, since the “regular” ones are at the exhibition in Paris.

https://www.phillipscollection.org/curation/rothko-room

Thanks for the head’s up on the Phillips exhibit!

Rothko Chapel in Houston closed indefinitely because of hurricane damage
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/houstons-rothko-chapel-forced-to-close-due-to-hurricane-damage-1234714509/

Rothko Chapel reopens!
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/rothko-chapel-reopens-to-the-public-following-hurricane-damage-1234727994/

https://rothko.joonas.wtf