Tweed Museum of Art : Power of Art : Mark Rothko

Probably more than any other 20th century artist, Mark Rothko’s work has contributed to the idea that viewing art can be a meditative and spiritually engaging experience. Its power lies in the presentation of a tabula rasa, a blank space of color and barely discernable shapes, where our attention reveals subtle properties of art’s formal elements, producing a physiological and sensory experience divorced from narrative. Rothko’s insistence on the primacy of perceptual experience was so great that he suggested viewers stand exactly 18 inches from the surface of his large canvases, in order to surround themselves with their color and mass.

Rothko spent many years engaged with surrealism and biomorphic abstraction before removing any recognizable images from his art altogether. Non-objective abstraction (so-called because there is no image upon which we can all agree), engaged artists as diverse as Jackson Pollack, Barnet Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. These and other American and European-immigrant artists sought the logical next step for European surrealism and cubism. In a manifesto written for a 1942 exhibition, Rothko and Gottlieb summed it up:

“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.”

The artists presented here reduce the picture place to a set of flat, simple shapes, which create their own space, movement, and rhythm, when viewed for extended periods of time. Will Barnet, a visiting artist in UMD’s Summer Guest Artist program in the 1960s, was fascinated by Duluth’s industrial and natural landscape, and created this large work in response. Big Duluth is the least non-objective and Rothko-esque of the works in this section. Ann Royer used rectangles of flat color to experiment with the distortion which is aided by our perception of certain colors looking nearer or farther away. Throughout his entire career, Wisconsin painter Todd Boppel insisted, as Rothko did, on the essential flatness of the painting. Boppel used a highly controlled system of curved and straight lines and color “notes,” which cause the viewer to experience layers of shifting patterns.

Carravaggio

(Italian, 1571–1610)

Bernini

(Italian, 1598–1680)

Rembrandt

(Dutch, 1606–1669)

Jacques-Louis David

(French, 1748–1825)

Joseph Mallord William Turner

(British, 1775–1851)*

Van Gogh

(Dutch, 1853–1890)

Picasso

(Spanish, 1881–1973)

Rothko

(American, 1903–1970)


Carravaggio (Italian, 1571–1610) Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680) Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669) Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825) Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851)* Van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890) Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Rothko (American, 1903–1970) This activity is made possible in part by a grant from WNET/PBS 13, New York, through PBS 8/WDSE, Duluth. Probably more than any other 20th century artist, Mark Rothko’s work has contributed to the idea that viewing art can be a meditative and spiritually engaging experience. Its power lies in the presentation of a tabula rasa, a blank space of color and barely discernable shapes, where our attention reveals subtle properties of art’s formal elements, producing a physiological and sensory experience divorced from narrative. Rothko’s insistence on the primacy of perceptual experience was so great that he suggested viewers stand exactly 18 inches from the surface of his large canvases, in order to surround themselves with their color and mass. Rothko spent many years engaged with surrealism and biomorphic abstraction before removing any recognizable images from his art altogether. Non-objective abstraction (so-called because there is no image upon which we can all agree), engaged artists as diverse as Jackson Pollack, Barnet Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. These and other American and European-immigrant artists sought the logical next step for European surrealism and cubism. In a manifesto written for a 1942 exhibition, Rothko and Gottlieb summed it up: “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.” The artists presented here reduce the picture place to a set of flat, simple shapes, which create their own space, movement, and rhythm, when viewed for extended periods of time. Will Barnet, a visiting artist in UMD’s Summer Guest Artist program in the 1960s, was fascinated by Duluth’s industrial and natural landscape, and created this large work in response. Big Duluth is the least non-objective and Rothko-esque of the works in this section. Ann Royer used rectangles of flat color to experiment with the distortion which is aided by our perception of certain colors looking nearer or farther away. Throughout his entire career, Wisconsin painter Todd Boppel insisted, as Rothko did, on the essential flatness of the painting. Boppel used a highly controlled system of curved and straight lines and color “notes,” which cause the viewer to experience layers of shifting patterns.