Untitled
Mark Rothko
MARK ROTHKO, 1957. PIGMENTED HIDE GLUE AND OIL ON CANVAS.
Rothko’s works are not intellectual. To try and understand them academically is to miss the point entirely. Though he exists in the genre of colour-field painting, mentored by none other than the father of modern colour theory Josef Albers, Rothko digested the ideas and conceptualisation and synthesised them into works of pure, unbridled emotion. Inspired by vases of antiquities with colour bands, Native American spiritual art and European surrealism, these paintings, now signatures of the artist, did not come out of nowhere. They developed slowly, from early figurative work Rothko fell more and more into a world of expression unaltered and uncorrupted by figuration. Rothko chose not to title these works unless it was numerical, ensuring that the viewer was free from context in their experience. Rothko’s work do not depict an external world but an interior one, and to see them in person is to get lost in a expanse of total feeling.