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Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Russian-American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".

Childhood[link]

Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz, Mark Rotkovich) was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian Empire^[1] (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His father, Jacob Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia, those in Dvinsk had been spared from violent outbreaks of anti-Semitic pogroms. However, in an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko’s early childhood was plagued by fear.

Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob's return to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at the age of 5, where he studied the Talmud although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.

Emigration from Russia Empire (now Latvia) to the U.S.[link]

Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States, following the path of many other Jews who left Daugavpils in the wake of Cossack purges. These émigrés included two of Jacob's brothers, who managed to establish themselves as clothing manufacturers in Portland, Oregon, a common profession among Eastern European immigrants. Marcus remained in Russia with his mother and elder sister Sonia. They joined Jacob and the elder brothers later, arriving at Ellis Island in the winter of 1913 after 12 days at sea. Jacob's death a few months later left the family without economic support. One of Marcus’ great aunts did unskilled labor, Sonia operated a cash register, while Marcus worked in one of his uncle’s warehouses, selling newspapers to employees.

Marcus started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade, and completed the secondary level with honors at Lincoln High School in Portland, in June 1921 at the age of 17. He learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Rothko was passionate about such issues as workers’ rights and women's right to contraception.

He received a scholarship to Yale based on academic performance, but it has been suggested that Yale only made this offer in order to lure Rothko’s friend, Aaron Director, with a similar proposal. After one year, the scholarship ran out and Rothko took menial jobs to support his studies.

Rothko found the "WASP" Yale community to be elitist and racist. He and Aaron Director started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school’s stuffy, bourgeois attitude.^[2] Following his second year, Rothko dropped out, and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree 46 years later.

Early career[link]

In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. Even his self-described "beginning" at the Art Students League of New York was not whole-hearted commitment; two months after he returned to Portland to visit his family, he joined a theater group run by Clark Gable’s wife, Josephine Dillon. Whatever his dramatic ability may have been, he looked nothing like the successful actors of the day, and to him professional acting seemed an improbable career.

Returning to New York, Rothko briefly enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky.^{[citation needed]} This was probably his first encounter with a member of the "avant-garde". That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York taught by still-life artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew. It was due to Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko’s paintings from this era reveal a Weberian influence.

Rothko’s circle[link]

Rothko’s move to New York established him in a fertile artistic atmosphere. Modernist painters had shows in the New York galleries, and the city’s museums were an invaluable resource to foster a budding artist’s knowledge, experience and skills. Among those early influences were the works of the German Expressionists, the surrealist work of Paul Klee, and the paintings of Georges Rouault. In 1928, Rothko exhibited works with a group of other young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery.^[3] His paintings included dark, moody, expressionist interiors, as well as urban scenes, and were generally well accepted among critics and peers. Despite modest success, Rothko still needed to supplement his income, and in 1929 he began giving classes in painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy, where he remained as teacher until 1952. During this time, he met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery, fifteen years Rothko’s senior. Avery’s stylized, natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko.^[3] Soon Rothko's paintings took on Averian subject matter and color, as in Bathers, or Beach Scene of 1933/34.

Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their day painting and their evenings discussing art. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, whom he married on November 12. The following summer, Rothko’s first one-man show was held at the Portland Art Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles, as well as the works of Rothko’s pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy. His family was unable to understand Rothko’s decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Depression.^[4] Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkowitzes were mystified by Rothko’s seeming indifference to financial necessity; they felt he was doing his mother a disservice by not finding a more lucrative and realistic career.

First one-man show in New York[link]

Returning to New York, Rothko had his first East Coast one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. He showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. It was the oils that would capture the critics’ eye; Rothko’s use of rich fields of colors moved beyond Avery's influence. In late 1935, Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form "The Ten" (Whitney Ten Dissenters), whose mission (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show) was "to protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting." Rothko's style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works, yet, despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. He was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the Artists' Union. Begun in 1937, and including Gottlieb and Soloman, the group's plan was to create a municipal art gallery to show self-organized group exhibitions. The Artists' Union was a cooperative which brought together resources and talent of various artists to create an atmosphere of mutual admiration and self-promotion. In 1936, the group showed at the Galerie Bonaparte in France. Then, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery, in direct defiance of the Whitney Museum, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. It was also during this period that Rothko, like many artists, found employment with the Works Progress Administration, a labor relief agency created under Roosevelt’s New Deal in response to the economic crisis. As the Depression waned, Rothko continued on in government service, working for TRAP, an agency that employed artists, architects and laborers in the restoration and renovation of public buildings. Many other important artists were also employed by TRAP, including Avery, DeKooning, Pollock, Reinhardt, David Smith, Louise Nevelson, eight of the "Ten" artists of the dissenter group, and Rothko’s old teacher, Arshile Gorky.

Development of style[link]

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters. According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color."

Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and form at this time had become non-intellectual.

Rothko's work matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated – or self-destructed – in his final works for the Rothko Chapel. However, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period, and the late, transcendent fields of color, was a period of transition. It was a rich and complex milieu which included two important events in Rothko’s life: the onset of World War II, and his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Maturity[link]

Rothko separated from his wife, Edith Sachar, in the summer of 1937, following Edith’s increased success in the jewelry business. Rothko helped with his wife's business, but did not enjoy it. At this time, Rothko was, in comparison, a financial failure. He and Sachar reconciled several months later, yet their relationship remained tense. On February 21, 1938, Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke sudden deportation of American Jews.

In a related political development, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Rothko, along with Avery, Gottlieb, and others, left the American Artists’ Congress in order to dissociate themselves from the Congress’ alignment with radical Communism. In June, Rothko and a number of other artists formed the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Their aim was to keep their art free from political propaganda. A rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States heightened Rothko's fears of anti-Semitism, and in January 1940, he abbreviated his name from "Marcus Rothkowitz" to "Mark Rothko". The name "Roth," a common abbreviation, had become, as a result of its commonality, identifiably Jewish, therefore he settled upon "Rothko".^[5]

Inspiration from mythology[link]

Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color. The world crisis of war lent this search an immediacy, because he insisted that the new subject matter be of social impact, yet able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values. In his essay, "The Romantics Were Prompted," published in 1949, Rothko argued that the "archaic artist ... found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods" in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. For Rothko, "without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama."

Rothko’s use of mythology as a commentary on current history was not novel. Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman read and discussed the works of Freud and Jung, in particular their theories concerning dreams and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and understood mythological symbols as images that refer to themselves, operating in a space of human consciousness that transcends specific history and culture. Rothko later said his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth." He apparently stopped painting altogether for the length of 1940, and read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Frazer’s Golden Bough.

Influence of Nietzsche[link]

Rothko’s new vision would attempt to address modern man’s spiritual and creative mythological requirements. The most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko in this period was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche claimed that Greek tragedy had the function of the redemption of man from the terrors of mortal life. The exploration of novel topics in modern art ceased to be Rothko’s goal; from this point on, his art would bear the ultimate aim of relieving modern man’s spiritual emptiness. He believed that this "emptiness" was created partly by the lack of a mythology, which could, as described by Nietzsche,"[address]... the growth of a child’s mind and – to a mature man his life and struggles".

Rothko believed that his art could free the unconscious energies previously liberated by mythological images, symbols, and rituals. He considered himself a "mythmaker," and proclaimed "the exhilarated tragic experience, is for me the only source of art."

Many of his paintings of this period contrast barbaric scenes of violence with those of civilized passivity, with imagery drawn primarily from Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. In his 1942 painting, The Omen of the Eagle, the archetypal images of, in Rothko’s words, "man, bird, beast and tree ... merge into a single tragic idea." The bird, an eagle, was not without contemporary historical relevance, as both the United States and Germany (in its claim to inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire) used the eagle as a national symbol. Rothko’s cross-cultural, trans-historical reading of myth perfectly addresses the psychological and emotional roots of the symbol, making it universally available to anyone who might wish to see it. A list of the titles of the paintings from this period is illustrative of Rothko’s use of myth: Antigone, Oedipus, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leda, The Furies, Altar of Orpheus. Judeo-Christian imagery is evoked: Gethsemane, The Last Supper, Rites of Lilith, as are Egyptian (Room in Karnak) and Syrian (The Syrian Bull). Soon after the war, Rothko felt his titles were limiting the larger, transcendent aims of his paintings, and so removed them altogether.

"Mythomorphic" Abstractionism[link]

At the root of Rothko and Gottlieb’s presentation of archaic forms and symbols as subject matter illuminating modern existence had been the influence of Surrealism, Cubism, and abstract art. In 1936, Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, "Cubism and Abstract Art," and "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," which greatly influenced his celebrated 1938 Subway Scene.

In 1942, following the success of shows by Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, who had immigrated to the United States because of the war, Surrealism took New York by storm. Rothko and his peers, Gottlieb and Newman, met and discussed the art and ideas of these European pioneers, especially those of Mondrian. They began to regard themselves as heirs to the European avant-garde.

With mythic form as a catalyst, they would merge the two European styles of Surrealism and abstraction. As a result, Rothko’s work became increasingly abstract; perhaps ironically, Rothko himself described the process as being one toward "clarity."

New paintings were unveiled at a 1942 show at Macy’s department store in New York City. In response to a negative review by the New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto (written mainly by Rothko) which stated, in response to the Times critic’s self-professed "befuddlement" over the new work,

Rothko's vision of myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void had been set in motion decades before, by his reading of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, among others. Unlike his predecessors, Rothko would, in his later period, develop his philosophy of the tragic ideal into the realm of pure abstraction. He thereby questioned the possibility for mankind to transform a cradle of imagery into a new set of images, no longer dependent on tribal, archaic, and religious mythologies – the very symbols Rothko had utilized and struggled with during his middle period.

Break with Surrealism[link]

On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Sachar separated again. Rothko suffered a long depression following their divorce. Thinking that a change of scenery might help, Rothko returned to Portland. From there he traveled to Berkeley, where he met artist Clyfford Still, and the two began a close friendship. Still’s deeply abstract paintings would be of considerable influence on Rothko’s later works. In the autumn of 1943, Rothko returned to New York, where he met noted collector Peggy Guggenheim. Her assistant, Howard Putzel, convinced Guggenheim to show Rothko in her The Art of This Century Gallery. Rothko’s one-man show at Guggenheim's gallery, in late 1945, resulted in few sales (prices ranging from $150 to $750), and in less-than-favorable reviews. During this period, Rothko had been stimulated by Still’s abstract landscapes of color, and his style shifted away from surrealism. Rothko's experiments in interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms had run their course. His future lay with abstraction:

Rothko's 1945 masterpiece, "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea" illustrates his newfound propensity towards abstraction. Sometimes it is interpreted as a meditation on Rothko’s courtship of his second wife, Mary Ellen "Mell" Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in the spring of 1945. The painting presents two humanlike forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colors, in subtle grays and browns. The rigid rectangular background foreshadows Rothko’s later experiments in pure color. The painting was completed, not coincidentally, in the year the Second World War ended.

Despite the abandonment of his "Mythomorphic Abstractionism" (as described by ARTnews), Rothko would still be recognized by the public primarily for his "Surrealist" works, for the remainder of the 1940s. The Whitney Museum included them in their annual exhibit of Contemporary Art from 1943 to 1950.

Rothko's "multiforms"[link]

The year 1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s transitional "multiform" paintings. The term "multiform" has been applied by art critics; this word was never used by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings. Several of them, including No. 18 (1948) and Untitled (also 1948), are masterpieces in their own right. Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure, and as self-contained units of human expression. For Rothko, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a "breath of life" he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era. This new form seemed filled with possibility, whereas his experimentation with mythological symbolism had become a tired formula, in much the same way as he viewed his late 1930s experiments in urban settings. The "multiforms" brought Rothko to a realization of his mature, signature style, and was the only style Rothko would never fully abandon prior to his death.

Rothko, in the middle of a crucial period of transition, had been impressed by Clyfford Still’s abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still’s native North Dakota. In 1947, during a summer semester teaching at the California School of Fine Art, Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum, and they realized the idea in New York in the following year. Named "The Subjects of the Artists School," they employed David Hare and Robert Motherwell, among others. Though the group was short-lived and separated later in the same year, the school was the center of a flurry of activity in contemporary art. In addition to his teaching experience, Rothko began to contribute articles to two new art publications, "Tiger’s Eye" and "Possibilities". Using the forums as an opportunity to assess the current art scene, Rothko also discussed in detail his own artwork and philosophy of art. These articles reflect the elimination of figurative elements from his work. He described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space," free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism."

In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Matisse’s Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as a key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

Late period[link]

No. 14 at SF MoMA

Soon, the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island. He invited only a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948. It was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. The green bar in "Magenta, Black, Green on Orange", on the other hand, appears to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker." ^[6] Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to make up for a lack of substance. In retaliation, Rothko stated:

He even went so far as to recommend that a viewer position themselves as little as 18 inches away from the canvas^[7] so that the viewer might experience a sense of intimacy, as well as awe, a transcendence of the individual, and a sense of the unknown.

As Rothko achieved success, he became increasingly protective of his works, turning down several potentially important sales and exhibition opportunities.

Again, Rothko’s aims, in some critics’ and viewers’ estimation, exceeded his methods. Many of the abstract expressionists exhibited pretensions for something approximating a spiritual experience, or at least an experience that exceeded the boundaries of the purely aesthetic. In later years, Rothko emphasized the spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Rothko Chapel.

Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade after the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.

The general method for these paintings was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas, and to paint significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. His brush strokes were fast and light, a method he would continue to use until his death. His increasing adeptness at this method is apparent in the paintings completed for the Chapel. With a total lack of figurative representation, what drama there is to be found in a late Rothko is in the contrast of colors, radiating, as it were, against one another. His paintings can then be likened to a sort of fugal arrangement: each variation counterpoised against one another, yet all existing within one architectonic structure.

Rothko used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants. Electron microscopy and ultraviolet analysis conducted by the MOLAB showed that he employed natural substances such as egg and glue, as well as artificial materials including acrylic resins, phenol formaldehyde, modified alkyd, and others.^[9] One of his objectives was to make the various layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing of colors, such that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones.

European travels[link]

Rothko and his wife visited Europe for five months in early 1950. The last time he had been in Europe was during his childhood in Latvia, at that time part of Russia. Yet he did not return to his motherland, preferring to visit the important museums of England, France and Italy. He much admired European art, and he visited the major museums of Paris. Besides viewing many paintings, the architecture and the music of Europe left a deep impression on Rothko. The frescoes of Fra Angelico in the monastery of San Marco at Florence most impressed him. Angelico’s intimately bright tempera frescoes magnificently contrast with the grandeur and monastic serenity of the surrounding architecture. Certainly the spirituality and concentration on light appealed to Rothko’s sensibilities, as did Angelico’s economic circumstances, which Rothko saw as similar to his own, having always been forced to struggle to exist as an artist.

Of Angelico, Rothko stated "As an artist you have to be a thief and steal a place for yourself on the rich man’s wall." He felt he was still struggling, despite some promising developments, including the sale of a painting for one thousand dollars to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and the purchase of "Number 10" (1950) for the Museum of Modern Art.

Rothko had one-man shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 and 1951, and at other galleries across the world, including Japan, São Paulo and Amsterdam. The 1952 "Fifteen Americans" show curated by Dorothy Canning Miller at the Museum of Modern Art formally heralded the abstract artists, including works by Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes. It also created a dispute between Rothko and Barnett Newman, after Newman accused Rothko of having attempted to exclude him from the show. Growing success as a group led to infighting, and claims to supremacy and leadership. When "Fortune" magazine named a Rothko painting as a good investment, Newman and Still, out of jealousy, branded him a sell-out, secretly possessing bourgeois aspirations. Still wrote to Rothko to request the paintings he had given Rothko over the years. Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends’ jealousy.

During the 1950 Europe trip, Rothko's wife became pregnant. On December 30, when they were back in New York, she gave birth to a daughter, Kathy Lynn, called "Kate" in honor of Rothko’s mother.

Reactions to his own increasing success[link]

Shortly thereafter, due to the Fortune magazine plug and further purchases by clients, Rothko’s financial situation began to improve. In addition to sales of paintings, he also had money from his teaching position at Brooklyn College. In 1954, he exhibited in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met art dealer Sidney Janis, who represented Pollock and Franz Kline. Their relationship proved mutually beneficial.

Despite his fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion, and a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion, and that the true purpose of his work was not being grasped by collectors, audiences or critics. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential, and therefore, must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those that might inquire after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is "so accurate." His paintings’ "surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say."

He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." The "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression of "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings, albeit in a more pure form. What is common among these stylistic innovations is a concern for "tragedy, ecstasy and doom." Rothko’s comment on viewers breaking down in tears before his paintings that may have convinced the De Menils to construct the Rothko Chapel. Whatever Rothko’s feeling about the audience or the critical establishment’s interpretation of his work, it is apparent that, by 1958, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas was growing increasingly dark. His bright reds, yellows and oranges were subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays and blacks.

In November 1958, Rothko gave an Address to Pratt Institute. In the address he discusses Art as a trade and offers, "The recipe of a work of art - its ingredients - how to make it - the formula.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality... Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death. 2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist. 3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire. 4. Irony, This is a modern ingredient - the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on 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.

I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements." ^[10]

Seagram Murals / Four Seasons Restaurant artistic commission[link]

In 1958, Rothko was awarded the first of two major mural commissions that proved both rewarding and frustrating. The beverage company Joseph Seagram and Sons had recently completed their new building on Park Avenue, designed by architects Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Rothko agreed to provide paintings for the building’s new luxury restaurant, The Four Seasons.

For Rothko, this commission presented a new challenge for it was the first time he was required not only to design a coordinated series of paintings, but to produce an artwork space concept for a large, specific interior. Over the following three months, Rothko completed forty paintings, three full series in dark red and brown. He altered his horizontal format to vertical to complement the restaurant’s vertical features: columns, walls, doors and windows.

The following June, Rothko and his family again traveled to Europe. While on the SS Independence he disclosed to John Fischer, publisher of Harper's, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days."

While in Europe, the Rothkos traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice and Pompeii. In Florence, he visited Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, to see first-hand the library’s vestibule, from which he drew further inspiration for the murals. He remarked that the "room had exactly the feeling that I wanted [...] it gives the visitor the feeling of being caught in a room with the doors and windows walled-in shut." Further he was influenced by the sombre colors of the murals in the Pompeiian Villa of the Mysteries.^[11] Following the trip to Italy, the Rothkos voyaged to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, before returning to the United States.

Once back in New York, Rothko and wife Mell visited the near-completed Four Seasons restaurant. Upset with the restaurant’s dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko immediately refused to continue the project, and returned the commission cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company. Seagram had intended to honor Rothko's emergence to prominence through his selection, and his breach of contract and public expression of outrage were unexpected.

Rothko kept the commissioned paintings in storage until 1968. Given that Rothko had known in advance about the luxury decor of the restaurant and the social class of its future patrons, the exact motives for his abrupt repudiation remain mysterious. Rothko never fully explained his conflicted emotions over the incident, which exemplified his temperamental personality. The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London’s Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.^[12]

Rising prominence in the United States[link]

In the Tower: Mark Rothko, an exhibit featuring Rothko's 1964 black-on-black paintings from Rothko Chapel. The exhibit is inside the National Gallery of Art's East Building, Tower Gallery, (main tower, pictured) in Washington, D.C.

Rothko’s first completed space was created in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., following the purchase of four paintings by collector Duncan Phillips. Rothko’s fame and wealth had substantially increased; his paintings began to sell to notable collectors, including the Rockefellers. In January 1961, Rothko sat next to Joseph Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball. Later that year, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, to considerable commercial and critical success. In spite of this newfound notoriety, the art world had already turned its attention from the now passé abstract expressionists to the "next big thing", Pop Art, particularly the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist.

Rothko labeled Pop-Art artists "charlatans and young opportunists", and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of Pop Art, "are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns' flags, Rothko said, "we worked for years to get rid of all that." It was not that Rothko could not accept being replaced, so much as an inability to accept what was replacing him: he found it vapid.

Rothko received a second mural commission project, this time a wall of paintings for the penthouse of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center. He made twenty-two sketches, from which six murals were completed and only five were installed. Harvard President Nathan Pusey, following an explanation of the religious symbology of the Triptych, had the paintings hung in January 1963, and later shown at the Guggenheim. During installation, Rothko found the paintings to be compromised by the room’s lighting. Despite the installation of fiberglass shades, the paintings were removed in the late 1970s and, due to the fugitive nature of some of the red pigments, were placed in dark storage and only displayed periodically.

On August 31, 1963, Mell gave birth to a second child, Christopher. That autumn, Rothko signed with the Marlborough Gallery for sales of his work outside the United States. Stateside, he continued to sell the artwork directly from his studio. Bernard Reis, Rothko’s financial advisor, was also, unbeknownst to the artist, the Gallery’s accountant and, together with his co-workers, were later responsible for one of art history’s largest scandals.

The Rothko Chapel[link]

The Rothko Chapel is located adjacent to the Menil Collection and The University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. The building is small and windowless. It is a geometric, "postmodern" structure, located in a turn-of-the-century middle-class Houston neighborhood. The Chapel, the Menil Collection, and the nearby Cy Twombly gallery were funded by Texas oil millionaires John and Dominique de Menil.

In 1964, Rothko moved into his last New York studio at 157 East 69th Street, equipping the studio with pulleys carrying large walls of canvas material to regulate light from a central cupola, to simulate lighting he planned for the Rothko Chapel. Despite warnings about the difference in light between New York and Texas, Rothko persisted with the experiment, setting to work on the canvases. Rothko told friends he intended the Chapel to be his single most important artistic statement. He became considerably involved in the layout of the building, insisting that it feature a central cupola like that of his studio. Architect Philip Johnson, unable to compromise with Rothko’s vision, left the project in 1967, and was replaced with Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. The architects frequently flew to New York to consult, and on one occasion brought with them a miniature of the building for Rothko's approval.

For Rothko, the Chapel was to be a destination, a place of pilgrimage far from the center of art (in this case, New York) where seekers of Rothko’s newly "religious" artwork could journey. Initially, the Chapel, now non-denominational, was to be specifically Roman Catholic, and during the first three years of the project (1964–67) Rothko believed it would remain so. Thus Rothko’s design of the building and the religious implications of the paintings were inspired by Roman Catholic art and architecture. Its octagonal shape is based on the Byzantine church of St. Maria Assunta, and the format of the triptychs is based on paintings of the Crucifixion. The De Menils believed the universal "spiritual" aspect of Rothko’s work would complement the elements of Roman Catholicism.

Rothko’s painting technique required considerable physical stamina that the ailing artist was no longer able to muster. To create the paintings he envisioned, Rothko was forced to hire two assistants to apply the chestnut-brown paint in quick strokes of several layers: "brick reds, deep reds, black mauves." On half of the works, Rothko applied none of the paint himself, and was for the most part content to supervise the slow, arduous process. He felt the completion of the paintings to be "torment" and the inevitable result was to create "something you don’t want to look at."

The Chapel is the culmination of six years of Rothko’s life and represents his gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, to witness these paintings is to submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, which, through its transcendence of subject matter, approximates that of consciousness itself. It forces one to approach the limits of experience and awakens one to the awareness of one’s own existence. For others, the Chapel houses 14 large paintings whose dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces represent hermeticism and contemplation.

The Chapel paintings consist of a monochrome triptych in soft brown on the central wall (three 5-by-15-foot panels), and a pair of triptychs on the left and right made of opaque black rectangles. Between the triptychs are four individual paintings (11 by 15 feet each), and one additional individual painting faces the central triptych from the opposite wall. The effect is to surround the viewer with massive, imposing visions of darkness. Despite its basis in religious symbolism (the triptych) and less-than-subtle imagery (the crucifixion), the paintings are difficult to attach specifically to traditional Christian symbolism, and may act on the viewers subliminally. Active spiritual or aesthetic inquiry may be elicited from the viewer in the same way as a religious icon having specific symbolism. In this way, Rothko’s erasure of symbols both removes and creates barriers to the work.

As it turned out, these works would be his final artistic statement to the world. They were finally unveiled at the Chapel’s opening in 1971. Rothko never saw the completed Chapel and never installed the paintings. On February 28, 1971, at the dedication, Dominique De Menil said, "We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine," noting Rothko’s courage in painting what might be called "impenetrable fortresses" of color. The drama for many critics of Rothko’s work is the uneasy position of the paintings between, as Chase notes, "nothingness or vapidity" and "dignified ‘mute icons’ offering ‘the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today’."

Suicide and aftermath[link]

In the spring of 1968, Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm (defect in the arterial wall, that gradually leads to outpouching of the vessel and at times frank rupture). Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. However, he did follow the medical advice given not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height, and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper. Meanwhile, Rothko's marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship. Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into his studio.

On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had sliced his arms with a razor found lying at his side. During autopsy it was discovered he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was 66 years old. The Seagram Murals arrived in London for display at the Tate Gallery on the very day of his suicide.^[13]

Rothko's grave at East Marion Cemetery, East Marion, New York.

Shortly before his death, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, had created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that would receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death. Reis later sold the paintings to the Marlborough Gallery at substantially reduced values, and then split the subsequent profits from sales to customers with Gallery representatives. In 1971, Rothko’s children filed a lawsuit against Reis, Morton Levine, and Theodore Stamos, the executors of his estate, over the sham sales. The lawsuit continued for more than 10 years and became known as the Rothko Case. In 1975, the defendants were found liable for negligence and conflict of interest, were removed as executors of the Rothko estate by court order, and, along with Marlborough Gallery, were required to pay a $9.2 million damages judgment to the estate. This amount represents merely a very small fraction of the eventual vast financial value achieved since then for collectors and exhibitors of the numerous Rothko works produced in his lifetime.^[14]

Rothko's remains were first buried in East Marion Cemetery on the North Fork of Long Island, New York, in a plot belonging to Stamos, an artist who had been a friend of Rothko. Beginning in 2006, Rothko's children, Dr. Kate Rothko Prizel, and her brother, Christopher Rothko, sought to disinter Rothko's remains and reinter them, together with his wife's remains, in Sharon Gardens in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In April 2008, Justice Arthur G. Pitts of the New York State Supreme Court agreed to permit the transfer of Rothko's remains.^[15][16] The plan was approved by Georgianna Savas, executor of the estate of Stamos.^[17]

Legacy[link]

The complete life works on canvas of Mark Rothko, some 836 known to exist, have been individually catalogued by art historian David Anfam in Mark Rothko: the works on canvas : catalogue raisonné (Yale University Press).

The settlement of his estate became the subject of the Rothko Case.

A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, The Artist's Reality, was edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006.^[18]

Red, a play based on Rothko, written by John Logan, opened at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on December 3, 2009. The one-act, 90 minute play centers around the period of development of the Seagram Murals. Alfred Molina played Rothko. It was directed by the Donmar's artistic director Michael Grandage.^[19] It had sell-out attendance.

In March 2010, Red moved to the John Golden Theater [1] on Broadway in New York City with the same stars (Alfred Molina, Eddie Redmayne) and director. It ran from 1 April to 27 June 2010 receiving generally favorable reviews^[20] and winning six Tony awards, including Best Play. Red has subsequently been produced by Auckland Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company^[21] and the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin.

The family collection of Mark Rothko works owned by Mark Rothko Estate has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York, since 1978.

Art market[link]

In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, Homage to Matisse, broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at a public auction, at US$ 22.5 million.^[22]

In May 2007, Rothko's 1950 painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), broke this record again, selling at US$ 72.8 million at Sotheby's New York. The painting was sold by philanthropist David Rockefeller, who attended the auction.^[23]

In May 2011, Christie's auctions sold a previously unknown Rothko painting, accounting for the work as #836. The work was added to the existing Rothko catalog of 835 works after expert authentication. The newly discovered painting, Untitled, #17, created in 1961, came to light when a private collector put it up for sale, claiming he bought it directly from the artist. A seven-foot-tall oil on canvas in red and pink on an ochre background, the painting opened with a house bid at US$ 13 million and sold for US$ 30 million, plus sellers and buyers fees (US$ 33 million, all inclusive).^[24]

In May 2012, Rothko's 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow (#693 in Anfam's catalogue raisonné) was sold by Christie's, New York, for US$ 86.9 million, setting a new nominal-value record for a post-war painting at a public auction.^{[25][26][27][28]} The painting had formerly been in the collection of abstract expressionism built up by David and Gerry Pincus.^[29]

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Chave, Anne. Mark Rothko, 1903–1970: A Retrospective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Breslin, J.E.B. Mark Rothko – A Biography, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Rothko, Mark (1999). "The Individual and the Social." In Harrison, Charles & Paul Wood (Eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas (563–565). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003). ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. pp. 294–297

Bibliography[link]

• Dore Ashton, About Rothko, Oxford University Press, 1983.
• John Gage, Barbara Novak & Brian O'Doherty, Eric Michaud, Jeffrey Weiss, Rothko, Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1999.
• Mark Rothko 1903–1970. Tate Gallery Publishing, 1987.
• David Anfam, Mark Rothko—The Works on Canvas: A Catalogue Raisonne, Yale University Press, 1998.
• Mark Rothko, The Artist's reality, with Introduction by Christopher Rothko, Yale University Press, 2004.
• Mordechai Omer and Christopher Rothko (eds.), Mark Rothko. Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2007.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mark Rothko

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mark Rothko

• The Pace Gallery
• Mark Rothko at the Museum of Modern Art
• National Gallery web feature on Mark Rothko includes an overview of Rothko's career, numerous examples of his art, a biography of the artist
• The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, is dedicated to Rothko paintings and non-denominational worship
• Mark Rothko's Gravesite
• ArtCyclopedia contains links to galleries and museums with Rothko pieces and articles on Rothko.
• Essay on Mark Rothko – in Examinations Archives
• Jackson Pollock & Mark Rothko video screener
• Guardian slideshow including pictures of works and photograph of the artist
• Mark Rothko Web Portal The Art Story Artist Information on Rothko
• Independent slideshow has several works
• BBC's Power of Art The documentary series Simon Schama's Power of Art featured Mark Rothko.
• "Mark Rothko, an abstract humanist" DVD. A documentary film by Isy Morgensztern.French/English NTSC. http://www.editionsmontparnasse.fr/p926/Rothko-DVD

Tate Modern exhibition

• Mark Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern, London, September 2008 – February 2009 includes curator interview
  • Press reviews:
    • The Times (includes video)
    • The Times, a second Times review
    • The Observer
    • You can have too much Rothko - Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent, 3 October 2008.
    • The Telegraph

Whitechapel Gallery exhibition

• Rothko Britain exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 9 September 2011 - 26 February 2012
  • Reviews:
    • [2] The Guardian review September 11 2011
    • [3] The Guardian review September 8 2011
    • [4] The Telegraph review 9 September 2011
    • [5] Timeout article online
    • [6] The Independent article 11 September 2011

Smithsonian Archives of American Art

• Interview with Bernard Braddon and Sidney Schectman Conducted by Avis Berman, New York City, New York, 1981 October 9. Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art (Braddon & Schectman were owners of the Mercury Gallery which exhibited the works of the Ten in the 1930s).
• Oral history interview with Sonia Allen, 1984 Sept. 15; Rothko's sister

Simon Schama
Born	(1945-02-13) 13 February 1945 (age 67) London
Nationality	British
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Christ's College, Cambridge

Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.^[1] He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. Other works on history and art include The Embarrassment of Riches, Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes,^[2] and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens.^[1] Schama is an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.^[1]

Life and early career[link]

The son of Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey, Schama was born in London.^[1][3] In the mid-1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in the Introduction to Landscape & Memory (pp. 3–4)

I had no hill [the previous paragraph had talked of his enthusiasm for Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. ... It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. ...

In 1956 Schama won a scholarship to the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Cricklewood, (from 1961 Elstree, Herts.), followed by Christ's College, Cambridge, reading history under J. H. Plumb and graduating with a Starred First in 1966.^[1]

He worked for short periods as a lecturer in history at Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at Oxford, where he was made a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the French Revolution.^[1] At this time, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson History Prize. The book was originally intended as a study of the French Revolution, but as published in 1977, it focused on the effect of the Patriot revolution in The Netherlands, and its aftermath.

His second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978), is a study of the Zionist aims of Edmond James de Rothschild and James Armand de Rothschild.

He is married to Ginny Papaioannou, a geneticist from California; they have two children.^[4]

In the United States[link]

In 1980 Schama took up a chair at Harvard University. His next book, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), again focused on Dutch history.^[5] In it, Schama interpreted the ambivalences that informed the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, held in balance between the conflicting imperatives, to live richly and with power, or to live a godly life. The iconographic evidence that Schama draws upon, in 317 illustrations, of emblems and propaganda that defined Dutch character, prefigured his expansion in the 1990s as a commentator on art and visual culture.^[6]

Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution, and won the 1990 NCR Book Award. Citizens was very well received and sold admirably. Its view that the violence of the Terror was inherent from the start of the Revolution, however, has received serious criticism.^[1][7]

In 1991, he published Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations),^[8] a relatively slender work of unusual structure and point-of-view in that it looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart, that of General James Wolfe – and the famous painting by Benjamin West – and that of (by murder) George Parkman, uncle of the better known Francis Parkman. Schama mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases, exploring the historian's inability "ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing the documentation," and speculatively bridging "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." Not all readers absorbed the nuance of the title: it received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception. Traditional historians in particular denounced Schama's integration of fact and conjecture to produce a seamless narrative^[9] but later assessments took a more relaxed view of the experiment.^[10] It was an approach soon taken up by such historical writers as Peter Ackroyd, David Taylor and Richard Holmes.^[11] Sales in hardback exceeded Schama's earlier works.^[12]

Schama at Strand Bookstore, New York City

Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) focused on the relationship between physical environment and folk memory, separating the components of landscape as wood, water and rock, enmeshed in the cultural consciousness of collective "memory" that are embodied in myths, which Schama finds to be expressed outwardly in ceremony and text. While in many ways even more personal and idiosyncratic than Dead Certainties, roaming through widening circles of digressions, this book was also more traditionally structured and better-defined in its approach. While many reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes.^[13]

Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than from traditional academia. This was borne out when Schama became art critic for The New Yorker in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with professorial duties at Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was published in 2005 under the title Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success. Despite the book's title, it contrasts the biographies of Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens.

BBC[link]

In 1995 Schama wrote and presented a series called Landscape and Memory to accompany his book of the same name.

The year 2000 saw Schama return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain. Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular style with his highly characteristic delivery, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by a group of historians about Schama's condensed recounting of the British Isles' history on this occasion, particularly by those specialising in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of insular Celtic civilisation.^[14] The series was eventually expanded to three, with 15 episodes^[15][16] produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until 1965;^[16] it went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there is some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the History Channel.^[16]

In 2001 Schama received a CBE. In 2003 he signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around US$5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The first result of the deal was a book and TV show entitled Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, dealing in particular with the proclamation issued during the Revolutionary War by Lord Dunmore offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown.

In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series, Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works: Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa, Rembrandt's Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Jacques-Louis David's The Death Of Marat, J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows, Picasso's Guernica, and Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals.^[17] It was also shown on PBS in the United States.^[18]

In October 2008 BBC broadcast a four-part television series called The American Future: A History presented and written by Schama. In March 2009, Schama presented a BBC Radio 4 show entitled 'Baseball and Me', both exploring the history of the game and describing his own personal support of the Boston Red Sox.

In 2010, Schama presented a series of ten talks for the BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View:

• Why We Like Tough Guys in Politics: When times are hard people seem to prefer tough leaders.
• Singing in the Rain: Schama looks forward to spring with personal reflections on the changing seasons.
• At the Heart of the Matter: The politics surrounding President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms.
• The Gift of the Gab: The history of political rhetoric and the power during election campaigns of televised debates.
• Behold, Newstralia!: Celebrates the distinctive history and culture of New Zealand and regrets any renewed talk of joining forces with Australia.
• A Welcome Slice of American Pie: Reflection on the quality of American food and eating habits.
• The Drama of Politics: The timeless drama of British politics.
• When Money is Just an Illusion: Reflection on the meaning of money as represented by coins and notes and in art.
• Hearts of Oak: Reflection on the significance of one of the sights that will greet new MPs in the chamber of the House of Commons - the panelling made of solid oak.
• Britain's New Politics: Reflection on the 2010 United Kingdom General Election, favourably comparing the British system for a swift handover of power to the cumbersome American one.

Politics[link]

Schama is a supporter of the Labour Party, donating £2,000 to Oona King's bid to become Labour's candidate for the 2012 London Mayoral election.^[19]

Israel[link]

Schama was critical of a call by British novelist John Berger for an academic boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians. Writing in The Guardian in an article co-authored with lawyer Anthony Julius, Schama compared Berger's academic boycott to policies adopted by Nazi Germany, noting "This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores."^[20]

In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated with Vivienne Westwood the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war.^[21] He characterised Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centres as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah.^[21] With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view."^[21]

United States[link]

Schama is a vocal supporter of President Barack Obama^[22] and critic of George W. Bush.^[23] He appeared on the BBC's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, clashing with John Bolton.^[24]

Writing style[link]

Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive to both historians and a wider readership. It is "packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce".^[1] He has also received criticism for dumbing down history, presenting a "grossly oversimplified and mythologising view of the history of nations" and not fostering critical thinking.^[25]

Criticism[link]

Susan Buck-Morss criticizes Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age for its "selective national history" of the Dutch Republic, "that omits much or all of the colonizing story."^[26] "One would have no idea that Dutch hegemony in the slave trade (replacing Spain and Portugal as major players) contributed substantially to the enormous 'overload' of wealth that he describes as becoming so socially and morally problematic during the century of Dutch 'centrality' to the 'commerce of the world.'"^[27]

Publications[link]

Books

• Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (1977)
• Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
• The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987)
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)^[1]
• Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991)
• Landscape and Memory (1995)^[2][13]
• Rembrandt's Eyes (1999)^[2]
• A History of Britain Vol. I (2000, ISBN 0-563-48714-3)
• A History of Britain Vol. II (2001, ISBN 0-563-48718-6)
• A History of Britain Vol. III (2002, ISBN 0-563-48719-4)
• Hang Ups: Essays on Art (2005)
• Rough Crossings (2005, ISBN 0-06-053916-X)
• Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006, ISBN 0-06-117610-9)^[18]
• The American Future: A History (2009, ISBN 0-06-053923-2)
• Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill and My Mother

Documentaries

• Landscape and Memory (1995), in five parts
• Rembrandt: The Public Eye and the Private Gaze (1995)
• Simon Schama's A History of Britain – BBC (2000), in 15 parts
• Simon Schama's John Donne - 2009
• Murder at Harvard - PBS (2003)
• Rough Crossings – BBC (2005)
• Simon Schama's Power of Art – BBC (2006), in eight parts
• The American Future: A History – BBC (2008), in four parts
• Simon Schama's: Obama's America – BBC (2009).

Prizes & Other Honors[link]

• 1977 Wolfson History Prize, for Patriots and Liberators
• 1977 Leo Gershoy Award, for Patriots and Liberators
• 1987 New York Times Best Books of the Year, for The Embarrassment of Riches
• 1989 New York Times Best Books of the Year, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
• 1989 Yorkshire Post Book Award, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
• 1996 Lionel Trilling Book Award, for Landscape and Memory
• 1996 WH Smith Literary Award, for Landscape and Memory
• 2001 Broadcasting Press Guild Writer's Award, for A History of Britain
• 2001 Nominated for BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award for Specialised Programme or Series (Arts, History, Religion and Science), for A History of Britain
• 2002 Nominated for BAFTA Richard Dimbleby Award for the Best Presenter (Factual, Features and News), for A History of Britain
• 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction winner, for Rough Crossings^[28]
• 2006 Hessell-Tiltman Prize Shortlist, for Rough Crossings
• 2007 Nominated for BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award for Specialized Factual Programme or Series, for Simon Schama's Power of Art
• 2008 The Daily Telegraph's 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Columbia History faculty page
• Columbia Art History faculty page
• "Free Fight", with Schama, offers "a new look at Britain, the United States, slavery and freedom during the Revolutionary War". The Brian Lehrer Show, 8 May 2006.
• Simon Schama’s The American History: A Future A Talk at the Shanghai International Literary Festival
• Audio: Simon Schama in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum
• Booknotes interview with Schama on Citizens, 14 July 1989.
• Works by Simon Schama on Open Library at the Internet Archive

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Simon Schama

Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938), is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although it is difficult to categorize his work. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.

Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.

Life[link]

Marden was born in Bronxville, New York and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1957 to 1958), receiving his BFA from the Boston University, School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1961. Marden earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1963), where he studied with Esteban Vicente, Alex Katz, Jon Schueler, Jack Tworkov, Reginald Pollack, Philip Pearlstein, and Gabor Peterdi. Among his fellow students were the future artists Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Robert Mangold.

It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that would characterize his drawings and paintings in the proceeding decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats, and the repeated use of a muted palette. In his early work of the 1960s and 1970s, he used simplified means, typically monochrome canvases either alone or in series of panels, diptychs or triptychs. These include the works The Dylan Painting, 1966; "1986" (now in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); 1969's Fave (the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin); and Lethykos (for Tonto), 1976 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Career[link]

Early years[link]

Marden relocated to New York in 1963, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns while employed as a guard at the Jewish Museum, New York during the museum's Johns's 1964 retrospective. The following summer Marden traveled to Paris where he began to make compressed charcoal and graphite grid-patterned drawings. Marden's graphic works are a corollary to his paintings, and he would transfer ideas into even his most recent paintings and drawings. It was also in Paris that he admired the work of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Fautrier, although masters such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and Edouard Manet have also informed Marden's artistic practice.

In 1966, at Dorothea Rockburne's suggestion, Marden was hired by Robert Rauschenberg to work as his assistant. That same year he had his first solo show in New York at the Bykert Gallery, which exhibited the first of his classic oil-and-beeswax paintings.

Mature work[link]

Paintings are born from a particular experience, or in reaction to having spent time in a specific place. In 1971, Brice and his wife, Helen Harrington, visited the Greek island of Hydra, to which they have returned every year since, and the light and landscape have greatly influenced his work (see, for instance, the five Grove Group paintings, 1972–1980; Souvenir de Grèce works on paper, 1974–1996). After preparing designs for stained-glass windows for Basle Cathedral in 1977, he became interested in expressing in his paintings the conditions of colour and light in architecture. Between 1981-87, Marden made a total of 31 paintings on marble, all of them produced in Hydra.^[1]

In 1983, Marden and family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India; the artist became fascinated by the art, landscape, and culture of parts of Asia. Marden has subsequently incorporated numerous elements of certain Asian traditions into his work, making them one key to his process (the Shell Drawings, 1985–87). A visit in 1984 to the exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century, encouraged Marden to use the form, a predominant influence in his recent work—which can be seen in his acclaimed Cold Mountain series, both paintings and works on paper, 1989-1991.

In 2000, Marden embarked on The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, the longest two of which measure 24 feet.^[2] Writing in The New Yorker in 2006, the critic Peter Schjeldahl described Marden as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.".^[3]

Collections, retrospectives[link]

Marden has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions, and has also been the subject of numerous one-person shows and retrospectives. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966. In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta 5 in Kassel.^[4] His first museum show was the 1975 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York. In the fall of 2006, New York's Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings". The MoMA called the exhibition "an unprecedented gathering of [Marden's] work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career."^[5] The show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 2007, and finally to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart in the summer of that year. Originally, Marden was not enthusiastic about the idea. The works were divided into two periods: from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties and then the mid-eighties up to the present. It allowed the artist to reassess his previous works and focus on future works.^[6]

Honors[link]

In 1988, Marden became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2000, Brown University awarded the artist an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.

Art market[link]

One of Marden's paintings sold for nearly $3 million at Christie's in May 2006 already.^[7] Marden’s Cold Mountain I (Path) (1988-89), managed to almost double his auction record from May 2008 when it sold at Sotheby's for $9,602,500 on an $10-15 million estimate.^[8]

Personal[link]

His daughter, Mirabelle Marden, is a proprietor of Rivington Arms, an art gallery in New York. She is also a photographer.^[9]

His son, Nick Marden, by his first wife, Pauline Baez (sister of Joan), is a punk musician who participated in the New York punk scene of the 1970s and '80s.^{[citation needed]}

References[link]

External links[link]

• Brice Marden at the Matthew Marks Gallery
• Brice Marden on Cezanne and Asian Art in FLYP Media
• Biography and images at the Guggenheim Website
• Charlie Rose #12233 An Hour with Brice Marden, 17 November 2006 at Google Videos (Adobe Flash video)
• Brice Marden's Cold Mountain at the Dia Center
• Brice Marden bio at Crown Point Press
• Peter Schjeldahl on Brice Marden at the MoMA, 6 November, 2006

Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.

Early life[link]

Newman was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland.^[1] He studied philosophy at the City College of New York and worked in his father's business manufacturing clothing.^[1] From the 1930s he made paintings, said to be in an expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works.

A well-respected writer and critic who also organized exhibitions and wrote catalogs, Newman later became a member of the Uptown Group.

Career[link]

Barnett Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews before having his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image."^[3] Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter on April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis: ...it is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it."^[4]

Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948). The zips define the spatial structure of the painting, while simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.

The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. In some paintings of the 1950s, such as The Wild, which is eight feet tall by one and a half inches wide (2.4 meters by 2 centimeters), the zip is all there is to the work. Newman also made a few sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.

Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there is also Uriel (1954) and Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which as well as being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman's father, who had died in 1947.

The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings (1958–66), begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you forsaken me" - words spoken by Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the holocaust.

Newman's late works, such as the Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases - Anna's Light (1968), named in memory of his mother who had died in 1965, is his largest work, 28 feet wide by 9 feet tall (8.5 by 2.7 meters). Newman also worked on shaped canvases late in life, with Chartres (1969), for example, being triangular, and returned to sculpture, making a small number of sleek pieces in steel. These later paintings are executed in acrylic paint rather than the oil paint of earlier pieces. Of his sculptures, Broken Obelisk (1963) is the most monumental and best-known, depicting an inverted obelisk whose point balances on the apex of a pyramid.

Newman also made a series of lithographs, the 18 Cantos (1963–64) which, according to Newman, are meant to be evocative of music. He also made a small number of etchings.

Newman is generally classified as an abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to post painterly abstraction and the minimalist works of artists such as Frank Stella.

Newman was unappreciated as an artist for much of his life, being overlooked in favour of more colorful characters such as Jackson Pollock. The influential critic Clement Greenberg wrote enthusiastically about him, but it was not until the end of his life that he began to be taken really seriously. He was, however, an important influence on many younger painters.

Legacy[link]

Newman died in New York City of a heart attack in 1970.^[1]

Nine years after his death, Newman's widow Annalee founded the Barnett Newman Foundation. The Foundation not only functions as his official Estate, but also serves "to encourage the study and understanding of Barnett Newman's life and works."^[5] The Foundation was instrumental in creating Newman's Catalogue Raisonne in 2004.^[6] The U.S. copyright representative for the Barnett Newman Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.^[7]

Selected collections[link]

Among the public collections holding works by Barnett Newman are the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, Massachusetts), the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College, Ohio), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin State Museums, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museums, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (Japan), Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Menil Collection (Houston, Texas), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, Texas), the Nassau County Museum of Art (Roslyn Harbor, New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, Nebraska), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Tate Gallery (London), the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecticut), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota), the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (Cologne, Germany), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City).

See also[link]

• Voice of Fire painted by Newman in 1967.
• Broken Obelisk
• Vir Heroicus Sublimis

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
• Ann Temkin, Barnett Newman (Yale University Press, 2002.) [Catalogue for the Exhibition "Barnett Newman," Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 24 to July 7, 2002; Tate Modern London, September 19, 2002, to January 5, 2003] ISBN 0-87633-156-8
• Ellyn Childs Allison, ed., Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 2004.) ISBN 0-300-10167-8
• (French) Bruno Eble, "Barnett Newman et l'art roman", Paris, L'Harmattan, 2011, 267 p. ISBN 978-2-296-55188-6

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Barnett Newman

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Barnett Newman

• The Barnett Newman Foundation
• Barnett Newman at the Museum of Modern Art
• Newman exhibition at the Tate Gallery
• Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Newman's page at the Tate Gallery (includes images of the 18 Cantos and other works)
• American Museum of Natural History, Dept. of Anthropology correspondence with Barnett Newman and Betty Parsons, 1944-1946 in the collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art