by Nanne Barkdull - 28 Sep., 2007

   Mark Rothko on Painting

    by Nanne Barkdull

Never really knew much about Rothko until I read an essay on his work in James Elkins "Pictures and Tears". Art historians and critics who write well, with a passion for sharing how they experience a painting and what they know about it, instead of bonking you over the head with deconstructed academese, should be shouted from the mountaintops. imo.

As usual, take what inspires you and leave the rest.

* In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. [Rothko said "this is the essence of academicism".]

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

"We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

Nanne Barkdull is: Artist, Obsessive Gardener, Obsessive photographer, Life-long cartoonist, Life-long diarist, and Mother of a very cool, smart, wise, funny, loving teenage son.

Have a comment? Speak up!

Response:

"This statement was submitted by Rothko and Gottlieb (with Newman as unnamed editor) but Rothko stated that he only wrote point 5. When I was curator of the Rothko Foundation in the early 1980s I found Rothko's original notes for this letter to the New York Times. He initially planned to pen his own response. My findings were published in The Archives of American Art's Journal in 1984. I also included it in my recent monograph "The Rothko Book" published this year by Tate/Abrams. Rothko, Newman and other artists in their circle frequently wrote letters of dissent, culminating in the famous Irascibles letter (and iconic group photograph), which was a protest against the Met's exhibition of American artists in 1950. He virtually stopped writing personal statements after that. Fortunately, Yale University Press recently published a long-lost manuscript Rothko wrote from the 1930s to mid 1940s that is invauable to understanding his motivations. Bonnie Clearwater"