“Rothko developed his own formal dictionary” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about the Mark Rothko retrospective organized by the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

The first major retrospective of Mark Rothko in 25 years, since 1999, is taking place in Paris. The Fondation Louis Vuitton has collected some 115 works from international museums and private collections, notably the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the artist’s family, from his earliest figurative paintings to the abstract works for which he is best known today.

As you know, Marcus Yankelevich Rotkovich was born in 1903 in Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils), on the territory of the Russian Empire, into the family of a pharmacist. At home, by the way, they spoke Yiddish and Russian. And already in 1913 the whole family emigrated to the USA.

Already in the 1940s, his keen interest in philosophy (especially the works of Nietzsche) and Greek mythology gave his works an increasingly symbolist character. After experimenting with abstract expressionism (with Jackson Pollock) and then surrealism, he developed his own formal vocabulary.

Quite hostile to the so-called expressionism of action painting, Mark Rothko, along with Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, invented a new meditative mode of creativity, which the critic Clement Greenberg defined as “color field painting.”

In these works, Rothko expressed himself exclusively through fields of color with fuzzy edges. Sometimes monochrome, but often consisting of two or three stripes of different colors – yellow, red, ocher, orange, as well as blue and white – the paintings seem to convey a deep spiritual dimension.

In 1958, Rothko received a commission for a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. As a result, the artist did not submit the work and kept the entire series. 11 years later he donated nine paintings to the Tate Gallery.

These works, clearly different from the previous ones with their deep red hues, are presented in a special gallery room and will be included in the Louis Vuitton retrospective.

As you know, Rothko committed suicide on February 25, 1970, taking a huge dose of alcohol and sleeping pills in his New York studio.