Exhibit of the week
Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through March 31
“Gazing at a Rothko is a meditative act,” and that is no accident, said Angelica Aboulhosn in the Washington City Paper. Mark Rothko intended his work to be experienced almost religiously, and the effects he achieved with paint “did not come easy.” An “exquisite” new survey of his paintings on paper is currently hanging at the National Gallery, and the show offers an unusual opportunity to witness how the great American abstractionist (1903–70) arrived at his late mastery. Visitors who are aware that he committed suicide at 66 will encounter one late “chapel-like” gallery lined with the kind of brooding color-field compositions they expect. Standing before these large gray-and-brown paintings, all created a few months before his death, “it feels as if you might fall in, or through.”
But the very next room is filled with sunny, pastel-tinged paintings that Rothko completed almost simultaneously. In his bid to convey the essence of human experience, no single mood sufficed.
In Rothko’s early works, dating from 1933 to ’49, “we see him struggling to find his artistic footing,” said Alice Gauvin in The New York Sun. And that makes sense. Born in today’s Latvia before moving to Portland, Ore., at 10, he was an outsider in his youth and ostracized for being Jewish when he briefly attended Yale. He struggled financially during the Depression and was shaken by World War II and the Holocaust. Before his career took hold in the mid-1940s, he painted “eerie” beach scenes and “severe” portraits. Success finally arrived when he waded into surrealism, creating paintings that were powerfully foreboding. By 1949, his signature rectangles began to emerge and “the work starts to breathe,” while his 1950s paintings “run the spectrum of human experience,” conveying moods I read as “alternately joyful, tender, aggressive, and yearning.” His paintings from that point on “simultaneously resonate with each other and overwhelm the viewer, an effect similar to that produced by Gregorian chant.”
“That Rothko foretold his death in gray, brown, and black is a tidy conclusion to his life story,” said Mark Jenkins in The Washington Post.
He produced the late paintings that have been deemed morbid after separating from his wife and while in poor health. But this “revelatory” show pushes back against easy assumptions by positioning his more radiant 1969 works last. “These are colors of sun, sky, and water, not night and shadow,” and they establish a connection with the lustrous work he’d been making since the ’50s. Spend time with any of them and you’ll notice that you are being invited to feel their effect for yourself. “Rothko’s religious experiences are offered without a particular creed, just elegant form and enveloping color.”