Only one month remains to see almost 100 works at the National Gallery of Art by one of the most recognized names and styles in contemporary American art, Mark Rothko in his “Paintings on Paper.”
The show is huge, displayed in eight rooms on two floors, and although titled “works on paper,” Rothko considered them to be completed paintings, not merely preliminary studies for his studio, says the National Gallery, the world’s largest public depository of Rothko art.
Many of the works are on public view for the first time and range from early watercolors to oil and acrylic paintings, some measuring up to seven feet tall.
Rothko (1903-1970) began his art career drawing urban scenes, influenced by the impressionists before moving to surrealism and later joining the abstract expressionists of New York City. In the early 1950s, he developed his “signature” style of large horizontal blocks of bright colors, repetition which may seem boring to some after a while (shudder that I would ever suggest this! An anathema to Rothko devotees!).
The artist wanted viewers to experience art as he did with passion and understanding.
Michaela Milgrom, a Gallery research assistant, quotes Rothko: He was “interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom… and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”
He sometimes refused to sell to buyers who did not respond to his works like he wanted them to, like he did. (Not to worry at the National Gallery: The guards and docents will not throw anyone out for dispassionate looks!)
Largely self-taught, Rothko studied classical art (Michelangelo and Rembrandt van Rijn were favorites) in books and at galleries, monuments and museums worldwide, like at the Museum of Modern Art where he spent hours at Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” Matisse, who is known for his skilled combination of color and line.
An unofficial Mark Rothko website says that he believed “art was truly an expression of emotion and social circumstance and he had a deep distrust for money and material wealth.”
Indeed, a famous story from 1958 says Rothko yanked 30 of his works (and returned the $35,000 commission, his first) from the Four Seasons restaurant in New York because he didn’t like the eatery’s wealthy customers ogling his art just because it was “the next big thing.”
When he was 10 years old, he arrived with his mother and sister at Ellis Island from Latvia, his birthplace and then part of Russia. The family soon joined his father and brothers in Portland, Oregon, where his father had earlier taken his older sons to escape the draft in Russia’s Imperial Army.
Mark Rothko graduated from high school in Portland and received a scholarship to Yale University, but he did not graduate, finding the school to be elitist and racist. (It awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1969.) Soon after Yale, he found himself in New York working in the garment district where, one day, he was stopped by students drawing a model.
And thus, his art career took shape.
To support himself, Rothko worked part-time jobs, one, teaching art classes to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center from 1929 to 1946. During this time he began writing a book, never completed, about the similarities between children’s art and the work of modern painters.
He spoke four languages and studied Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, and the German Expressionists (whom the National Gallery features concurrently in the West Building). Other favorites were Pablo Picasso, Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery, his mentor.
Rothko became a citizen of the United States in 1938, and concerned about antisemitism in America and Europe, changed his name to Mark Rothko from Markus Rothkowitz.
Like Vincent van Gogh who painted black birds in the sky in “Wheatfields with Crows” before his suicide in 1890, Rothko used blacks, browns, and greys for his blocks towards the end of his own life, his suicide in 1970.
Today Rothko’s art is among the priciest in the world. A year ago “World Art News” reported Rothko’s “Violet, Green and Red” was one of the five most expensive pieces of art ever sold, going for $186 million in 2014.
Today he stands as his own model, one of independence and freedom from conventions, giving mavericks a brand to emulate and strengthening those who buck trends and keep on going, following their own rhythms.
A hardcover catalog of the exhibition with more than 125 illustrations and 200 pages is available in the shops for $45.00.
Since receiving a major gift from the Mark Rothko Foundation in 1986 of 1,100 of the artist’s works, the National Gallery has loaned more than 240 Rothkos to 200 museums, galleries, and embassies worldwide.
This show is not to miss! Excellent for children of all ages. Who knows what young (or old) Rothko is standing at the artist’s 1945 “Baptismal Scene,” mesmerized as Rothko was by a drawing?
The exhibition was curated by the National Gallery’s Adam Greenhalgh, and next moves to Norway for the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Scandinavia.
The National Gallery is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the north side of the National Mall between Third and Ninth streets along Constitution Avenue NW. Rothko is in the East Building with the entrance on Fourth Street. Admission is free!
