2023-11-05 12:37:42
An immense, but intimate painting. A seemingly simple, but profound style. The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) He was an artist of contrasts. The history of art has consecrated him as one of the great masters of abstract expressionism, along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But throughout his career he developed a very personal, unmistakable pictorial language. It is one of the most evident lessons of the extensive retrospective that the Foundation Louis Vuitton dedicated to Rothko.
This important private cultural institution, located in the Boulogne forest (in the west of Paris), exhibits until early April 115 frames of one of the great artists of the second half of the 20th century. Many of them have come to Europe from American museums and 13 come from private collections. It is not only the most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Rothko in recent decades in France, but also one of the most notable this fall and winter in the French capital.
Seventy years after having reached his artistic peak, Rothko’s abstract paintings strike and generate fascination. And at the time they had been disparaged by critics. “A kind of Mondrian effect of a fluid type, in the abandonment of lines and contours,” the art critic Howard Devree wrote in 1950 with a derogatory tone in the New York Timesin which he compared his works with those of the Dutch artist, another of the precursors of the pictorial abstraction.
“The removal of all obstacles”
One of the key moments in Rothko’s career was the abandonment of human figuration and any mimetic reminiscence of reality. “The painter’s work evolves over time towards greater clarity, towards the elimination of all obstacles between painter and the ideabetween the idea and the viewer,” the American artist stated in 1949 in the magazine The Tiger’s Eye. That process led him to abstraction. But before reaching his artistic maturity, he went through an apprenticeship of several decades. This is evident in this retrospective in Paris.
Born in 1903 within a Jewish family in the city of Dvinsk (now Latvia) in the Russian Empire, he emigrated to the United States when he was barely ten years old. There he began studying at Yale University, but quickly abandoned his university studies and went to live in New York to start a career as an artist. The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to the first paintings painted in the 1930s. Matisse admirer, Rothko attempted to portray New York modernity through a figurative and expressionist style. “I am part of a generation that is very interested in the human figure. But this one doesn’t suit my needs. When I represent it, I mutilate it,” a frustrated Rothko wrote then.
His first paintings were nothing out of this world. After that first expressionist stage, in the following decade he dedicated himself to a until mythological, with an evident influence from Picasso. His style oscillated between symbolism and surrealism, so in vogue at the time. This is reflected in works such as Antigone of 1941 or Sacrifice of Iphigenia 1942. Although by then Rothko had already written a treatise on art, his creations did not stand out.
In fact, the most interesting thing about that period is the realization that, although the American imitated other people’s styles, Those features that would characterize his abstract style years later already stood out in his paintings. For example, a certain predisposition for the technique of nuanced and a diffuse painting. It could even be described as atmospheric.
A unique but universal pictorial language
It was from the 1950s onwards that Rothko completely abandoned figuration and adopted his distinctive abstract style. He painted dozens and dozens of compositions with three horizontal rectangles on a background with another chromatic variation. Those paintings gained in size, they became more immense. At the same time, he stopped giving them a title. At the Louis Vuitton Foundation you can see dozens of works by this period classified as “classic” by Rothko specialists. The American artist, on the other hand, did not like to talk about his works. He preferred that these communicate directly with the viewer.
The paintings for the Four Seasons
“I have enclosed the most absolute violence in every delimited centimeter of its surface”, wrote Rothko in full artistic maturity. In that quote, recalled in the exhibition, he seemed to summarize the famous duality between the Apollonian (order and symmetry) and the Dionysian (ecstasy and violence) on which Friedrich Nietzsche reflected. The American artist was also a regular reader of the Danish theologian in those years Soren Kierkegaard, one of the precursors of existentialist thought in the 19th century. With his abstract art, Rothko did not seek formal authenticity, but rather to question the human condition. His paintings turn out to be pictorial music. They offer a suggestive contemplative journey for both believing minds and sensitive secular spirits.
Another success of the exhibition is to show the variations and changes that occurred during that “classic” stage. One of the rooms is dedicated to the monumental paintings that Rothko painted for the New York restaurant The Four Seasonsbut which in the end ended up exhibited in a specific room at the Tate Modern in London, where they are compared to the art of William Turner (1775-1851, whom the American admired so much.
These canvases painted with black vertical rectangles and different graduations of garnet They are among the most powerful in the entire exhibition, as well as another room with canvases painted only in variations of black and brown. Without a doubt, a demonstration of Rothko’s talent, capable of developing a universal pictorial language. A true genius who can be seen in Paris until April 2.
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