Your favorite Rothko

Not that computer screens will ever do any of them justice, but.

http://www.hallmarkgallery.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/rothko-orange.jpg

Of course this, which is as much a matter of architecture and interior space as it is painting, but Rothko is mostly responsible for it. So it counts.

http://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/rothkochapel.jpg

uh, well I guess you know *xpost* is my favorite Rothko.

really never got his stuff until i saw the tate modern rooms and their...oppressive warmth(?) i suppose. still don't totally get it but am open to it. i kind of love that white centre sold for 76 million or whatever it was.

Seriously, though, JPEGs aside, texture (to say nothing of nuance) is such an integral part of the Rothko experience, that no reproduction really does him any justice (and I say this as the owner of a very expensive coffee-table book).

Orange & Yellow is, I believe, housed in the Philly museum (or was, at least, circa-98). I remember stumbling upon it, not knowing it was there, but having seen it on slides and in books as part of my art-history curriculum, and I must have stood there for half an hour.

i went to the late rothko tate exhibition, and the 'moonscapes/beachscapes' were particularly wonderful.

xxpost I know. The painting in the Chapel are actually all pretty much black, they just look purple in the photo because of the filtered sun from the skylight. When you walk around them, they're different from every angle.

LA people have an enviable collection nearby, IIRC, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Always loved No. 61:

http://www.jewishpress.com/UploadedImages/stdImage/450Rothko2.jpg

It feels like, top to bottom: sky, water, earth. Upside down it's the same, but a different time of day.

Yeah, Rothko can only be truly appreciated in person (though that goes for just about any painting really). Totally breathtakingly beautiful from a few feet away. I can't pick one.

do love that one Kenan, nice counter to your first pick.

xxpost: Fuck me if that doesn't have almost the exact combination of blues, grays and deep magentas as the Titian I posted on the "favorite color" thread. All of this seems strangely synchronized.

I like them all. But I'm leaning towards this one to-day.
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/atl/images/rothko/rothko3.jpg

l-r: Yeah. Uh huh. Fuck yeah!

erm... not that there are really words...

I'd have trouble owning a Rothko, because I'd always be wanting to re-hang it in a different direction according to my mood.

l-r: Yeah. Uh huh. Fuck yeah! - lol racist

I want a beige riot of my own.

(Off-White Man) in Hammersmith Palais?

Came in to say Chapel. so uh...good work, Kenan!

It's about being completely inside the painting.

http://images.worldgallery.co.uk/i/prints/rw/lg/5/0/Mark-Rothko-Red--White--Brown-50092.jpg

Red, white, brown.

kinda seems like Rothko's whole project forecloses havin' a fave, but I don't really know

i really loved the "black" ones i saw at the tate. those or the seagram murals.

I've said before that the Rothko Chapel is one of the only spaces I've ever been in that felt sacrosanct. I think this may be because at first it doesn't feel that way at all. It's in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next to a not-very-famous Catholic university, in the middle of a city that seems to hold nothing at all very dear, least of all its architecture and art. When you walk in, you've probably just come out of nerve-wracking traffic, pushed your parallel parking skills to the limit, etc., and then suddenly you're in this totally silent octagonal room that's lit only by indirect daylight and decorated only with 14 giant black canvases. Your first thought isn't likely, "This is amazing"; more like, "How the hell did I end up here?" I think of Philip Larkin walking onto a cathedral, taking off his cycle clips ("in awkward reverence"). He wonders why he walked in, but then he takes the time to really WONDER why he walked in. That's the kind of feeling the Rothko Chapel is designed to inspire. Fourteen huge black paintings, arranged in every direction around your head, are going to eventually make you ask "why." And if you need help, there's a copy of every major religious text in the world on a little table in the atrium. You can bring your own book if you like; the only rules are no photos, and be very very quiet.

(Of course I learned the "no photos" rule the hard way.)

one of my fav writings pinpointing the appeal of rothko (for me)...i actually forget where its from, some art book:

With Rothko, of course, it was always different. Not Genesis so much as Exodus. 'The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,' he said. 'And if you are moved by the color relationships, then you miss the point.' Then he
committed suicide.

Doesn't just about everyone experience that same shudder of vertigo standing before one of those great paintings of Rothko's high maturity -- the canvas poised neatly between self-possession and self-divulgence: it draws you out and gives Nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your Self there. Mute totemic authority: like what it must have been like to stand before the Burning Bush. For those Rothkos do not make a
statement; rather, they raise a demand, or more precisely maybe, a question. The kind of questions, though, that the kabbalists raised, the kind larger than the sum of their possible answers -- nothing can exhaust them. There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us -- at, and if we are
not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us.

it draws you out and gives Nothing back

Well bloody put. Not the only thing that does that, is it?

i like the one where... no wait that was a water-damaged pantone swatch book

I find the Rothko Chapel to be oppressive and claustrophobic. My favorite part of visiting it is walking outside and consoling myself with the Broken Obelisk.

You can bring your own book if you like; the only rules are no photos, and be very very quiet.

What lights?

The no-loitering lights. I guess you were not sufficiently moved to prompt their usage.

Yes. I suck.

:/

http://timelookingaround.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/T04148_9.jpg

that's a good one. i also like No. 5/No. 22, which is hanging at MoMA

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2400/2203607470_ed9ea4a963.jpg?v=0

I prefer the Rothko room at the Phillips to the Rothko chapel

They're very similar ideas. (I'm v unhappy that I haven't been to DC to see that space.) No way to say what exactly the difference is, but the colors are obviously brighter, and the room seems to move you up above the paintings instead of inside the paintings.

But I am totally guessing. There's no damn way to see a wall of yellow and orange except just to see it. Rothko can't work any other way.

Theres a Rothko of deep ochre dark brown with black fields over it at the National Gallery in Canberra that I loved when I used to hang out there lots (I had a membership). It worked so well in the ANG's space: soaring, concrete, quiet, modernist. It soaked me with depression. I loved it.

If I ever start my own country, I want this as the flag

http://images.easyart.com/i/prints/rw/lg/2/0/Mark-Rothko-Blue--Orange--Red--1961-206316.jpg

it's like a ghostly heavenly doorway. ooooOOOOOOoooooo...

http://londonsketchbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/rothko-red-on-maroon.jpg

It annoys and saddens me to no end that I haven't been able to find a picture of the painting on the right of this image:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8xZexczYgWs/SIo7_CgGDoI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/zNUazYpt1Zk/s320/rothko.jpg

I've went through my two catalogues and couldn't find it either. GIS didn't help either. It was the painting I must have looked at 20 minutes last year in Hamburg, but I can't figure out it's name. Anyone?

It looks like one of his Black on Grey works, there were a bunch of them in the Tate exhibition a few months ago:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/markrothko/roomguide/room9.shtm

Black on Grey Gray. Ones in the tate were all portrait format tho.

It could indeed be Untitled 1969 from that Tate link, yet the painting is much wider then it's pictured there (or they cropped it...). I can't find a picture of this painting this wide, though it's how I saw and experienced it (as seen on the picture I put up here, from the exhibition itself).

But thanks loads, Ledge, it could very well be the painting I'm looking for, but cropped on the Tate page. It's hard to tell with a measely picture when you've been in the painting.

What did you get from it? To me they weren't nearly as powerful as the Seagram murals. It was kinda fun imagining them as landscapes or seascapes or moonscapes, seeing the random details as different features, but I couldn't lose myself in them.

I don't know, it's so hard to put it under words. I was just deeply moved by the thousands of subtle color changes, the shapes that seemed to move and live. The black on top puts so much pressure on the gray too, like it was happening right there, right then, in the gray, the black hovering over, looking and pushing from above with great strength and threat. And there was one detail in the left bottom corner I remember vividly, because it almost seemed like a figurative image of a flowing river, or a sea. I could not shake that interpretation of that particular detail. But most of all it seemed a dark world with thousands of things moving and living and being, all on that same canvas, and I felt part of it shortly.

If that makes any sense, it's just so hard to express my love for it, that experience. Maybe I was just open to particularly that painting when I visited. I do know I love the painting ever since, even if I've yet to find it online.

Great stuff. I'd probably never have that reaction but it's good to hear what other people get out of things that don't move you that much.

That is definitely true, yes, thanks.

i like the ones with the big messy squares stacked on top of each other

Yeah, that one.

Haha at Trayce's current screen name.