(London)
Have you ever been surprised to find an extraordinarily imaginative and thoughtful mind behind a surprisingly simple and pure exterior? The simple and pure exterior can be perfectly in harmony with the surrounding environment and thus is not intended to attract noisy attention. Such exterior is there to actually protect ones inside; to stop the others and inspire them to contemplate and search for the answers within.
Picture: Mark Rothko paintings (courtesy of www.fadwebsite.com).
After seeing Mark Rothko’s paintings all in one place at Tate Modern in London I was left with exactly this impression. All in once place they are a true embodiment of the artist’s thoughts – bringing them to reality in a tangible form.
Red on Maroon 1959
© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998
Mark Rothko’s thoughts in his book The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
Artist and the Environment
“There is no doubt that the artist, being human, is both changed and influenced by his environment. The environmental factors that impress themselves upon him and his actions are infinite, and as time goes on and our investigations extend to more and more fields, we shall find many influences that we cannot trace as yet today. No doubt in their aggregate they will contribute much to our understanding of the artist, his motivations, and how they can be detected in his art.”
“Therefore, the fact that a man was rich or poor, that he lived in a flat or hilly country, that he was shy or forward with women, or that his parents had inherited traits that are associated with temperate or torrid climates or with what are considered the attributes of the Anglo-Saxon or Latin race – these circumstances may explain why the artist’s part in the plastic continuity showed this or that peculiarity. [...] And to make any intelligent study of art as art means the allotment to the artist of his place in that process. This is the constant, the only constant which will provide intelligibility to his function as an artist. The other factors are of infinite variety, unpredictable, and largely still unanalyzable. They provide us with that endless variety f appearances, with those different aspects of a similar thing which dispel monotony and which make this examination of the plastic process one of esthetic appeal and endless interest. It is in much the same way that we would hardly enjoy new and different friends if they were all the exact duplicate of the same pattern. In other words, the environment provides us with the clue for the examination of differences. The laws of painting in themselves provide us with the inevitable constant, with the point of reference, with the measure that makes differences relate to each other and intelligible.”
World of Verbal Ideas
And this idea I extremely love and could relate to:
“If we compare one art to another, it is not with the intention of contrasting their actuality, but to speak rather of the motivations and properties such as are admissible to the world of verbal ideas. [...] because philosophy shares with art its preoccupation with ideas in the terms of logic.”
Notions of Reality
“A painting is a statement of the artist’s notions of reality in the terms of plastic speech. In that sense the painter must be likened to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. [...] philosophy [...] must combine all these specialized truths within a single system.”
“…we would have to turn to their art to understand how they “felt about their world,” to know how their notions of reality found expression in their sensual perception of the world.”
Sensuality
“The function of art is therefore to make a generalization within the limits of its category. [...]
An essential characteristic of [...] generalizations is that they must show the relevance of all knowledge, intuition, experience, and whatever else is admissible as reality at any particular time. The artist’s hand must reduce all of these experiences for man as well. [...] He tries to give human beings direct contact with eternal verities through reduction of those verities to the realm of sensuality, which is the basic language for the human experience of all things. [...]
Sensuality is our index to reality.”
Human Sensations
“Plasticity, then, is the sensation of reality imparted to us by means of the sensation of things moving back and forth in space. The plastic elements are numerous. In fact, all of the devices and elements we will discuss contribute to this effect. [...] In fact, the differences between artists or their styles is, to a great extent, determined by the means they choose to produce this sensation.
Now, these elements are used also to produce many other sensations but ultimately the whole purpose of art is to produce something which is inward and quite apart from these elements. In other words, these plastic elements are simply a means to an end, not ends in themselves. [...]
Actually, the artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas.”
I invite you to compare these thoughts with his paintings — perhaps you will understand better his work and the reason why at the end of his commission Rothko refused his Seagram Murals to be displayed in the Seagrum Building in New York.
Take a look…
Similar Ideas:
And here are some other ideas from my writings that could go along together with Rothko’s thoughts:
More information:
- How Rothko’s Seagram murals found their way to London | The Guardian
- Exhibition at Tate Modern, London
- Curator’s tour of the exhibition
- A short biography of Latvian-born abstract expressionist artist and anarchist, Mark Rothko.
- Art Market Insight: Mark Rothko
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