Rothko-Hartung: Elective Affinities
In 1954, Mark Rothko produced a piece in homage to Matisse, and we know that he was very interested in the work of Pierre Bonnard, who was the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA in 1948. What was Mark Rothko’s view of European art, and what role did it play in the development of his work compared to American abstract expressionism? Rothko was fascinated by the chromaticism of Matisse and Bonnard, because he detected an autonomous visual strength in it which played a considerable role in his work. In his famous article about Fuseli from 1972 (1), Jean Starobinski explicitly associated Rothko, Bonnard and Matisse as “painters of pure colour,” whose pictorial DNA “makes you dream,” makes you “enter into reverie,” adding a certain Claude Monet to the family. A fine quartet...
Rothko travelled to Europe in 1950 and visited Hans Hartung’s studio in Arcueil in Paris. What did he see in the studio? In 1950, Rothko undertook a five-month trip to Europe for reasons that remain obscure to this day. In early spring, he was in Paris and, in a letter dated April 6th, he complained to Barnett Newman about a city he clearly did not like. This letter is symptomatic of his rejection of the “old world.” I think he was trying to find new impetus and stimulation to compensate for his disappointment. Thirteen days later, on the 19th, he met Hans Hartung, first at the Flore and then late into the night at the studio in Arcueil. He came away enchanted. Minna Journot, the assistant to the gallery owner Louis Carré (who was then in NewYork), acted as intermediary between them. But it was probably Rothko who requested the meeting—in any case, it was not Hartung. The two men became friends, and I was able to find the paintings that Rothko had seen and greatly appreciated. Amongst them was T1950-8, a painting which is now held at the Guggenheim in New York, and which combines floating areas of colour in the background with raging black graphics.
Does the Fondation Hartung-Bergman retain any traces of this meeting and, with the benefit of hindsight, can we now say that it was of particular importance to both artists? The traces are tenuous, but yes, there are some, and we can see how important Rothko was to Hartung—an importance that would manifest itself fully, albeit belatedly, in his explosive, cosmic “colorfields” from the 1960s. In my opinion, the reverse was hardly conceivable because, with his horror of Nazism, Rothko had an epidermal rejection of Germans. His connection with Hartung, obviously made possible by the fact that Hartung had fought against Hitler, was an exception and a miracle... There are also traces of their meetings in the 1960s, this time in the Manhattan studio. Mark’s son, Christopher, and the greatest Rothko specialist, David Anfam, were stunned when they saw these different archives. It has become so rare to discover new things about Rothko! Christopher was particularly moved by a double photographic portrait from 1964: a Minox shot by Hartung of his parents, Mary Alice and Mark, smiling together, caught by surprise. “I don't know of any others like it,” he told me.
TRAUMATISED BY LIFE
In 2021, in partnership with the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, Galerie Perrotin organised a landmark exhibition about Hans Hartung’s 1980s work, and at the same time, an exhibition about his links with Rothko, which you curated. A painting from 1982, flooded with a vaporous blue, was revealed to the public for the first time. Can you tell us more about this
work? T1982-H31, for such is its name, was indeed shown for the very first time. It had never been reproduced or exhibited before. I was waiting for the right moment to reveal it and objectively, this was it, because the Centre Pompidou had accepted the extraordinary loan of its magnificent 1963 Rothko. Hartung took up Rothko’s compositional methods (large hypnotic horizontal layers) but he did so with the means and colours of 1982: a projection of blues using a compressed air gun. I wanted to create confusion and suggest that this might be a completely unexpected Rothko, and it worked: a number of visitors were fooled, to the point of attributing it to the American painter on social networks!
How would you describe the intimate artistic bond, or elective affinity, that links the work of Hartung and Rothko? And is there still a great deal of research to be done on this subject? They were two moderns steeped in classical references, those of eighteenth-century music (Bach for Hartung, Mozart for Rothko) and Rembrandt, their common master in the field of painting.
They were also two people traumatised by life, exiled from Central and Eastern Europe by the tragedy of history. More than new research, what we need is a major, museumscale Rothko-Hartung exhibition.
Has Rothko’s work been shown extensively in Europe, and how has it been perceived? The real European discovery of Rothko took place in 1962-63. An exhibition of his work toured the continent, and in France it was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (as it would be again in 1999). Overall, the reception was very enthusiastic. Allow me to quote a little gem from the period. In an article in Cimaise from November 1962, Michel Ragon wrote about Rothko: “When he uses light colours, yellows and blues, he achieves an exceptional strength of expression with a minimum of means.” And he added, not without a touch of mischief: “You can imagine what intimate poetry such paintings can bring to a steel and glass building.” I love it...
In your opinion, why is it important to have a major Mark Rothko retrospective in Paris today? You have to realise that there are only two paintings by Rothko in our public collections, just two, one from 1963 and the other from 1964!They are in the Centre Pompidou, which will soon be closing its doors for a few years... Need I say more?
1 Jean Starobinski, “La vision de la dormeuse,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse n°5, Spring 1972.
Julie Chaizemartin is a journalist and art critic. Thomas Schlesser, the director of the Fondation Hartung-Bergman in Antibes, curated the exhibition Rothko-Hartung, une amitié multiforme (Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2021) and is the author, with Stanislas Valroff, of the documentary Rothko-Hartung: couleurs et cataclysmes (Bel-Air Média, 52 minutes, 2022).