Untitled (String Quartet)
Mark Rothko
MARK ROTHKO, 1935. OIL ON HARDBOARD.
To think of Mark Rothko is to think of colour fields. Imposing canvases of thick paint, dark hues that engulf in a pure abstraction, ominous and potent in their scale, their simplicity and their size. Yet Rothko only came to these definitive works when he was well into his forties. For his early period, he created impressionist, representational works depicting urban scenes in small vignettes, as with the Quartet here. It is thrilling to see an artist working outside of their signatures, for hiding within Rothko’s painting are clues for what is to come. He tried, in this period, to paint as a child; inspired by ‘primitive art’, he saw a relationship between artistic works of early civilization and the naivety of a child’s representation of their world. Even in these early representational works, we can see a mastery of colour as a tool for emotion, the deep browns and greys are menacing and there is a sense of imposition across the work. Remove the string players and the background could be a work from 20 years later in his maturity. To see Rothko’s early work is to see an artist stripping back to purity, grappling with the same themes and emotions but distilling them down to their most powerful form.