2023-10-29 02:46:01
PARIS – The Louis Vuitton Foundation has just opened a retrospective blockbuster of Mark Rothkothe Russian-American painter and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Displayed chronologically, the 115 works span the artist’s entire career, from his first figurative paintings in the 1930s (including his only self-portrait) to his monumental abstract works. According to Artnet, the exhibition is the “fulfillment of Bernard Arnault’s long-standing personal desire. No expense was spared.”
Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz was born in Latvia in 1903. At age 10, he moved to a poor Jewish neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Rising anti-Semitism – sounds familiar? – scared the family and led to the name change to Mark Rothko.
His father, a pharmacist, was a convinced Zionist, engaged in social policies and with aspirations to be a union leader. Rothko drank from this fountain and said he was an “anarchist” before he knew what that meant. A brilliant student, he was accepted into Yale but disliked academic life and, in 1925, moved to New York, where he lived until the end.
Without a steady job in the new city, he visited a friend who was taking an art course and realized that was what he wanted to do. Despite considering himself self-taught, he studied at The Art Students League and Parsons School of Design with Arshile Gorky, becoming part of the New York art scene alongside the great names of the time.
At the beginning of his career he experimented with a figurative and surrealist style, but did not achieve financial or critical success. In the 1940s, influenced by Clyfford Still, he began a transition to the abstract and began to exhibit constantly with Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning.
In 1958, he was one of the US representatives at the 29th Venice Biennale. In the same year, the Four Seasons restaurant, designed by Phillip Johnson in the iconic Seagram building, by architect Mies van der Rohe, commissioned panels from Rothko to decorate its walls. The venture was financially attractive and would take his works to the financial center of the world.
Rothko wanted to have a spacious, permanent place where the panels might be viewed together. Although many believe that Rothko had spiritual elevation motivations, this was not the intention of the artist with an anarchic streak – he wanted to cause discomfort, disturbance.
As the work was being completed, he was unable to exhibit there and terminated the contract. In conversation with a journalist from the magazine Harper’sIn 1960, Rothko said he would never accept a commission like that once more. He concluded that no painting should be displayed in a public place, as the true experience is solitary and individual.
He confessed that he accepted the task as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. “I hope to paint something that will ruin everyone’s appetite. ‘son of a bitch’ to eat at that restaurant. If the restaurant refused to put up my murals, that would be the best compliment. But they won’t. People will accept anything these days.”
To obtain the oppressive effect he desired, he used a dark palette, darker than he had used before, in red, brown and black to invoke human reactions to tragedy, ruin and ecstasy.
He explained at the time that he realized that the walls painted by Michelangelo in 1524 on the staircase of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, in Florence, had remained in his subconscious. According to Rothko, Michelangelo achieved exactly the kind of feeling he was looking for – that of being trapped in a room, altering the sense of space in a disturbing way.
Rothko believed that an image lives or dies depending on the viewer; so it would be deadly to let them go to a restaurant. He feared that his paintings would be condemned to mere decoration, without the sensitive gaze of someone who feels compassion for what they see. (The play Redwinner of several awards and staged in many countries, is the dramatic version of the preparation of these panels.)
Nine of the thirty panels created were donated to the Tate, in London, under the condition that they always be exhibited together and in an exclusive room. The fact that the Tate had the largest collection of works by the painter JM William Turner, whom he so admired, was decisive in choosing the museum that would receive the works as gifts. The works arrived in London on the day Rothko killed himself.
Despite having declared that he would no longer accept commissions, in 1964 John and Dominique de Menil, founders of the Renzo Piano-designed Menil Museum in Houston, commissioned panels for a meditative space. In total, Rothko prepared 14 paintings that today form the so-called Rothko Chapel, an ecumenical center that attracts pilgrims from all over the world. He died a year before the opening of what is considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
The Tate murals are now on display in Paris, along with works on loan from major museums around the world, in addition to the heirs’ collection.
Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, is co-curator of the retrospective. He was 6 years old when his father killed himself. His mother had a stroke and died 6 months following her husband. Christopher was left in the custody of his sister Kate, just 19 years old.
Rothko had 798 works in his studio and a will drawn up, in which he named three executors. The executors had an undisclosed relationship with the artist’s gallery, which purchased the works for below market value, leaving the heirs without their father’s works and with an estate much lower than what they were entitled to.
The daughter decided to start a legal fight once morest the executors and the gallery that kept the works. Nobody thought she would win, but following 15 years of legal battle, which became one of the most famous disputes in the art world, the works returned to her heirs. In addition to the fair financial issue, the children wanted to live with their father’s works.
Rothko began his abstract phase with more vivid and radiant colors, and darkened the palette over time.
Melancholic, in his final years he suffered from health issues and was unhappy with the success of pop art, which he saw as the opposite of his pursuit, and, depressed, he divorced and distanced himself from family and friends.
Rothko’s art is unique because it focuses on purely pictorial issues, such as color, surface, proportion and scale, seeking to bring luminosity, depth and contrast.
He didn’t like to name the works or explain them, he wanted everyone to live their own experience – according to their personal drama.
“Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are my tools as much as brushes and paints,” said Rothko.
The art market, even some museums, wanted to label Rothko as a spiritual leader, the creator of a sacred painting, like a Kandinsky or Mondrian, which would sell more and please collectors and the general public.
But what the artist really wanted didn’t sell much or attract crowds: Rothko wanted to destroy certainties. His masterpieces, works from the last years of his life, demand attention, emotion, thought and commitment from those who see them, forcing the viewer to confront themselves and their ghosts. Therefore, it is common to see people crying in front of certain screens. Obsessed with Mozart, he said that his music made him “smile through tears,” a perfect description of the feeling caused by his works.
The exhibition runs until April 2, 2024.
Rita Drummond
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