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Sunday, 10 October 2021

Mark Rothko: Mesmerising And Intimate Works On Paper

My latest review for Artlyst is of Mark Rothko, 1968: Clearing Away at Pace Gallery:

"Mark C. Taylor wrote in Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion that, ‘All of the major abstract expressionists were deeply interested in religion and actively incorporated spiritual concerns in their work.’ In ‘The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art’ Roger Lipsey highlighted the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Ad Reinhardt, while in ‘A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities’ John Dillenberger discussed Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. With ‘The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, ’ Charlene Spretnak added Clyfford Still, Sam Francis and Hans Hofmann. We can also include William Congdon, Richard Pousette-Dart, and, through his links to Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, to the group of Abstract Expressionists who incorporated spiritual concerns in their work.

Rodolfo Balzarotti has noted that Rothko with his Houston Chapel paintings, Newman with his Stations of the Cross, and Congdon with his paintings of biblical and gospel subjects connected with Catholic liturgy were all painting these cycles in the same time period. Their ‘choice of a context or a theme that is openly, almost provocatively religious, “confessional” even,’ he writes, ‘has precisely the function of orienting how these works are received by reiterating in the most peremptory way their moral and religious, or better still, metaphysical content.’

Among Mark Rothko’s artistic philosophies, he held that painting was a deeply psychological and spiritual experience through which basic human emotions could be communicated. He famously commented to a critic that ‘the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them’ and spoke of the ‘inner light’ in his paintings. His approach to painting enabled him to experiment with processes to develop a universal expression."

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Posted by Jonathan Evens at 20:26
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