Rothko Research Articles

A Historical Approach to Understanding Differentiation of RYB vs RGB

This article defines the roles of colors and presents their historical development as a fundamental means of expression within artwork. It also introduces color theorists and practices, including the mixing of pigments, a necessary technique for artists-designers in creating tangible results. Modern artists-designers have used these theorists to express themselves in producing an aesthetic experience in the viewer through their artwork, starting with Sir Isaac Newton’s light-spectrum experiments using a glass prism and a beam of white light, and continuing through Johannes Itten’s color-wheel and creative color-matching exercises. This article objective defines the significance of color, its historical development on the basis of earlier perceptual theorists’ findings that color acquires dimension and meaning in response to cultural-historical context or psychological realities. As a result, this paper also explores how color affects our emotions, our psychic and spiritual manifestations. This psychic-spiritual manifestation is revealed through a process of visual perception and experimenting with color and its symbolic meaning. Artists such as Seurat, Munch, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Picasso, Joan Miro, or Mark Rothko demonstrated the expressive power of color-pigment. The authors hope that this paper will bring significant discussion, awareness, will assist general readers and academic researchers and truly advance knowledge.

Manifestations of Alienation in Contemporary Art and Its Representations in Abstract Expressionism

This research investigates the theme of "Alienation." Since humans cannot simply accept their existence as a mere phenomenon or a taken-for-granted fact, their being is marked by anxiety, evil, worry, nothingness, and "alienation." This latter concept is considered a fundamental feature of human existence. It's a feeling that accompanies the eruption of contradictions, the loss of self, and the difficulty of adapting to others. Consequently, a sense of estrangement or dissatisfaction and alienation from the true self arises. Art is necessary to achieve reconciliation between the self and reality. Existentialists emphasize that a human being remains unfulfilled unless they find themselves in creative work that expresses their identity, role, and position in the world and existence. Artistic creation is an opportunity for self-expression and a possibility to connect with others, which dispels the feeling of alienation. Therefore, contemporary art must have its own treatments that correspond to the course of the era. One of its tools in achieving this was the "Abstract Expressionism" movement.This research is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to defining the research problem, which is identified by the following question: What are the manifestations of alienation in contemporary art? Do these manifestations have representations in the products of Abstract Expressionism? The importance of this research lies in its potential contribution to enhancing researchers' knowledge of the most important aspects of alienation and the role and necessity of art in the lives of individuals and society by achieving a kind of reconciliation between the self and reality. This research also aims to Shed light on the manifestations of alienation in contemporary art, reveal the manifestations of alienation in contemporary art and their representations in Abstract Expressionism. It also included the limitations of the research, which were defined as follows: Subject-: Artworks by the artist Mark Rothko. Time-based: 1903-1970 AD. Location-based: The United States of America. Definitions were also made for both linguistic and procedural terms. The second chapter is dedicated to the theoretical framework and previous studies. Chapter Three: Methodology In Chapter Three, the researcher outlines the research methodology, procedures, research community, and sample, which included (2) artworks by the artist Mark Rothko. The research concludes with Chapter Four, which presents the research findings and recommendations.

COLOUR and SPACE

Monica Billger, in her doctoral dissertation, states ‘The feasibility of working consciously with colours is limited by our knowledge about how the appearance of coloured materials varies with context, that is, how a coloured surface is affected by its spatial situation’ (Billger, 1999, p. 5). In association, however, we can also seek to understand how the application of colour provides the spatial context and/or potentiates our experience of spatiality. Within this paper, I will discuss some of the issues involved in our understanding and interpretation of spatiality. These include firstly, space and its relationship to colour; secondly, colour education in relation to colour and space, and thirdly, the potential of paintings or photographs of artists’ work in understanding colour and space. The two dimensional work of artists (such as Mark Rothko, Bridget Riley, Claude Monet, and Wassily Kandinsky) is a valuable source of information for emerging designers in the field of colour as a consequent of investigating and/or observing the work. Key relationships may be understood and applied to three dimensional spaces abstractly, and in practice, to environmental projects that are relevant to Interior Design and Architecture. Finally, I will explore the way I, in association with the tutors, have raised the students’ awareness of colour as a tool to assist in the moulding of three dimensions or space. This will include the discussion of one student’s work as an example of the process undertaken before summarising the link between three dimensional investigations and two dimensional observations and/or practices.

The Rothko Chapel: Profane or Sacred Space?

Despite the atheism of renowned abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, the artist was commissioned by Christians to create a sacred space that was originally intended to be used by religious believers: the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. The project started out as a collaboration between Rothko and another atheist: famed architect Phillip Johnson, who designed several prominent religious spaces throughout his distinguished career. While Johnson removed himself from the Chapel project early on, Rothko would have carried his conceptual vision all the way to the end if it were not for his tragic suicide just prior to the Chapel’s completion. Using as a guide the criteria for sacred space set forth in the classic work The Sacred and The Profane by famed historian Mircea Eliade, I will consider the question of how a religious space designed by non-believers can be rightly considered sacred, as well as ways in which it falls short.

Applying Quaternions to Recognize Hidden Details in Images: Rothko as a Case Study

Images or paintings with homogeneous colors may appear dull to the naked eye; however, there may be numerous details in the image that are expressed through subtle changes in color. This manuscript introduces a novel approach that can uncover these concealed details via a transformation that increases the distance between adjacent pixels, ultimately leading to a newly modified version of the input image. We chose the artworks of Mark Rothko—famous for their simplicity and limited color palette—as a case study. Our approach offers a different perspective, leading to the discovery of either accidental or deliberate clusters of colors. Our method is based on the quaternion ring, wherein a suitable multiplication can be used to boost the color difference between neighboring pixels, thereby unveiling new details in the image. The quality of the transformation between the original image and the resultant versions can be measured by the ratio between the number of connected components in the original image (m) and the number of connected components in the output versions (n), which usually satisfies nm≫1. Although this procedure has been employed as a case study for artworks, it can be applied to any type of image with a similar simplicity and limited color palette.

Renunciation

In their ruminations on Mark Rothko’s Chapel paintings, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit posit a mode of aesthetic consciousness produced by acts of renunciation. Rothko deliberately relinquishes his paintings’ visibility and thus, like Beckett and Resnais, impoverishes a primary feature of his artistic medium. Bersani and Dutoit’s concept of renunciation undermines modernist medium specificity and points to a form of pseudomorphosis that reveals the fundamental homo-ness between the arts. This speculative essay builds on their argument that such renunciative gestures produce aesthetic models of nondual consciousness and brings Bersani’s later writings into conversation with musical experience. In Bersani’s encounter with Proust and music, musical experience proffers a powerful ego solvent in favor of ontological interpenetration. An attention to music—here, that of Morton Feldman and Joan La Barbara—avers the power of modernism to shatter the modern ego.

Rothko and resonance

ABSTRACT I take Mark Rothko at his word when he claims that an encounter with his paintings involves ‘companionship’ and argue that this insight reflects the artist’s recognition that an observer and his work are in a relationship in which, as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa puts it, ‘both sides speak with their own voice’. To understand what this might mean, I first discuss Rosa’s theory of ‘resonance’ and its importance for the study of art. Then, I explore ‘resonance’ in relation to Rothko, relating it to how he manipulated the language of painting to de-centre the normative visual perception of the observer, but also how he potentially opens this observer up to radically non-normative psychological and somatic experiences. The de-centring involves making space for an active relationship with Rothko’s paintings which shifts the observer from the focused, outer-directed and controlling attention that usually dominates visual perception towards a more inwardly directed but more porous mode enacted under conditions of essential uncontrollability.

Rothko, the Rolling Stones, and Matisse: Grounding in a time of uncertainty

ABSTRACT In surfing the waves of COVID-19 and the current socio-political culture of alarm, uncertainty, and anxiety, I describe how exploring works by Mark Rothko, the Rolling Stones, and Henri Matisse helped me find grounded experiential footing during the pandemic. Rothko’s multiform and later paintings encouraged exploration of the soul, experiences of the ineffable, of life-and-death. In contrast, the Rolling Stones inspired me to feel my heart, my beat, my connectedness to rhythm and knowledge that presence rests on interpersonal connection. Finally, as seen in The Red Studio, Matisse and his use of color re-vivify the experience of living, and provided a roadmap back to optimism.

Rothko’s deep darkness

The paintings of artist, Mark Rothko (1903–1970), are considered in their religious dimension. The essay pursues the significance of Rothko’s words and works by moving from biographies and Rothko’s own writings to sites Rothko purportedly loved (e.g., Fra Angelico’s paintings at San Marco in Florence, Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello in Venice, Matisse’s Red Studio at the Museum of Modern Art). Moreover, the essay seeks to illuminate insight into the meaning of Rothko’s luminous panels (considering the artist’s claim to “paint reality”), and the reasoning behind his idiosyncratic instructions for installing his works low to the ground and in groups. The context of the Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas) is also considered. Rothko’s Jewish heritage and education recall the “luminous cloud” of the Hebrew Bible, while his love for San Marco and Torcello evoke the all-encompassing beauty of Orthodox sacred spaces. Perhaps in these images Rothko saw glimpses of the reality he sought to paint and discovered a way to display his work and communicate its reality most effectively.

Appreciation of Color-Field Paintings through Reception Theory: A Case Study of Mark Rothko

Appreciation of Color-Field Paintings through Reception Theory: A Case Study of Mark Rothko

Appreciation of Color-Field Paintings through Reception Theory: A Case Study of Mark Rothko

Appreciation of Color-Field Paintings through Reception Theory: A Case Study of Mark Rothko

Key characterization efforts to support the graffiti ink removal and care of Mark Rothko’s painting ‘Black on Maroon’ 1958

Analytical characterization efforts carried out in support of the conservation treatment of Mark Rothko's painting 'Black on Maroon' 1958 (Tate T01170), involving the removal of graffiti (tag) ink, are summarized. The proprietary ink product, of unfamiliar and unknown composition, was investigated using a suite of analytical techniques (IR spectroscopy, GC–MS, ICP-MS, pyrolysis GC–MS, thin layer chromatography, SEC, MALDI-TOF–MS, and UHPLC-MS) to identify key colorants and other components. The ink solubility properties proved vital to informing the solvent selection process for the ink removal procedure, which helped enable the re-display of the painting at Tate Modern in 2014. The possible impact of ink residues remaining within the cotton duck canvas support of the conserved painting was also explored using mockup canvas mechanical strength data, measured before and after ‘soiling’ at two ink levels to assess whether the ink residues had any immediate and possible longer-term effects on canvas properties. These findings, elucidated using a range of complementary analytical techniques, provide information on this hitherto-unknown graffiti product, contribute to a growing body of knowledge in this area, and offer analytical approaches which may be useful for the characterization of similar unknown materials, whether used to damage, augment, or create works of art.

EKPHRASTIC VOICE: ON JOAN LA BARBARA'S SOUND PAINTINGS

AbstractA considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.

Mysteria, the Beauty of Silence: a Program of Contemplation to Cultivate the Awareness of Beauty in Art Museums

Abstract This article analyzes the design, development, and evaluation of a program on the contemplation of beauty through art aimed at museums: Mysteria, the Beauty of Silence. It investigates if this program is an efficient way to cultivate the awareness of beauty and to favor its transformative power via the art that is contained within museums. The program had a gradual development and included the design of specific art-contemplation techniques. These techniques are eclectically based on the influence of Zen practices, Advaita Vedanta, Yoga, Mindfulness and the guidelines given by Mark Rothko to enable meaningful experiences. The program was developed in the Can Framis Museum of Barcelona (Spain). Twenty-four participants between the ages of 31 and 65 years each contributed over a period with a duration of nine weeks. The usage of a mixed methodology, both quantitative and qualitative, allowed demonstration of the existence of marked changes in the participants in terms of their significant experience with immaterial beauty.

Measuring the Rothko experience in school visitors to modern art museums

Recent studies in museum education focus on the quality of visitor experience to help engagement. To understand how it occurs when it comes to dealing with young visitors to modern art museums, the researchers studied the esthetic experience of Mark Rothko’s masterpiece Untitled (1969) with 678 primary and 335 secondary students. Four dimensions—sensory, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual, are taken into consideration for the development and preliminary validation of a specific instrument to evaluate the so-called “Rothko experience.” Based on quantitative data analysis, results suggest that school visitors can experience Mark Rothko’s modern art intensely by perceiving changes in its color and other sensory features while making self-references to time and space vanish. Besides, cultural background makes a difference in intensely experiencing Rothko’s modern art. Suggestions are made for the development of pedagogical strategies that engage young audience in museum experience of modern art.

Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis

Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis

Mark Rothko: Painting as Illustrated Nadir of Psyche’s Journey through the Underworld

Mark Rothko, who was greatly influenced by Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche, painted in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, and his paintings can be thought of as remnants of an underworld journey for both the individual and collective psyche. From Nietzsche’s influence, Rothko’s mature works were characterized by a contemplation of deep depth and stillness. Created by layering thin washes of paint color onto the canvas, these paintings can be thought of as hologlyphs, or images embodying the symbolic union of the opposites, known as the German Liebestod, or “love death,” implicit in the alchemical opus. This “love-death” represents the unconscious desire human beings have to unite with the Divine (an integration of the Apollonian and Dionysian elements of consciousness). Rothko’s paintings contain aspects of both light and dark, while his use of red symbolizes an alchemical rubedo (rebirth). Rothko was influenced by Johannes Itten, who sought to develop a comprehensive aesthetic theory of color that originated in the experience and intuition of the painter, was deeply inspired by Eastern traditions, where light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors, which are forces that express the subtle layering of energy that takes shape as matter and form. An exploration of alchemical and mythological theories of color reveals these subtle forces inherent in Rothko’s work.

The Relationship between New American Cinema with the American and European Video Art Movement: A Flow of Ideas

The Relationship between New American Cinema with the American and European Video Art Movement:A Flow of Ideas Alessandro Amaducci (bio) In 1962 experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas established the New American Cinema Group and The Filmmakers' Cooperative in New York, while in 1963 two significant events took place from an artistic point of view, but above all geographically. In one event, Nam June Paik, a South Korean musician who was experimenting with electronic music and the first electronic image production systems in the studios of the WDR radio broadcaster in Cologne (where he met composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, the artist Joseph Beuys, and the architect George Maciunas, who had recently founded the Neo-Dadaist art movement Fluxus), inaugurated the exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (DE) at the Parnass Gallery, Wuppertal (Germany). Two, the German painter and sculptor Wolf Vostell, co-founder of the Fluxus movement, inaugurated the 6 TV Dé-coll/age (US) exhibition at Smolin Gallery in New York. From one year to the next, New American Experimental Cinema and Video Art were officially born. In 1964, Nam June Paik moved definitively to New York, having become a very active member of the Fluxus movement but paradoxically contributing to the organization of the event that provoked an irremediable break within the group: the "scandalous" concert held in 1964 by Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York, Originale (DE, 1961), opposed by George Maciunas, who shortly after sent a postcard to Nam June Paik with the message, "Traitor. You left Fluxus." Nam June Paik, once the experience of the Fluxus movement was over, became within a few years the reference point of the American Video Art movement. Nam June Paik was not the only video artist active: around him there was already a rich and dynamic environment [End Page 196] made up of many artists, such as, among others, Dan Graham, Aldo Tambellini, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Eric Siegel, Frank Gillette, and Ira Schneider, and soon Video Art would find its home in the United States between Boston and New York. The birth of American Video Art can be placed in 1969 with a double event: the broadcasting of the anthological program The Medium Is the Medium. Video Visionaries (US) of Boston-based WGBH-TV and the exhibition TV As a Creative Medium (US) at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. In 1970, Wolf Vostell, who had never permanently moved to the United States and who had a rich artistic activity in Europe unrelated to the initiatives of Fluxus, decided to settle in Berlin. All these events lead us to reflect on the fact that between the 1950s and 60s there was an intense proliferation of ideas from Europe to the United States. This process was the consequence of a phenomenon that spanned the entire History of Art from the Second World War onwards, a period in which there was an intense migration of European avant-garde artists, musicians, poets, writers, and choreographers who decided to settle more or less permanently in the United States, especially in New York. This migration included, to name a few, Salvador Dali, Fernand Léger, the definitive return of Man Ray from Paris, Hans Richter, Robert Sebastian Matta, André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Louise Bourgeois, Piet Mondrian, Arnold Schönberg, Hans Hoffmann, Josef Albers, Moïse Kisling, Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), Georges Antheil, Georges Balanchine, Hanya Holm, Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters. But there was also another unstable geographical front: Eastern Europe. Igor Stravinsky, after the October Revolution, emigrated from Russia to Europe and then, before the Second World War, settled in the United States. Many Jewish families from Eastern Europe fled to the United States, such as Maya Deren from Ukraine, Mark Rothko from Russia, and Hedda Sterne from Romania. From Nazi-occupied Lithuania came George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas. The group of Surrealist and Dadaist artists who emigrated to the United States due to the Second World War was welcomed by the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who through her Gallery promoted the diffusion of this avantgarde art in the United States. One artist in...

Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament ed. by Elina Gertsman

Reviewed by: Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament ed. by Elina Gertsman Frances Lilliston Elina Gertsman, ed., Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 384 pp., 88 ills. Invoking abstraction in an art historical text inevitably gestures toward a particular historiography: the alarmingly vast corpus of literature regarding the rise of nonfigurative art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This presence looms large over the fourteen contributions compiled in Elina Gertsman's new edited volume, which deals lucidly and kaleidoscopically with the use of abstraction as both an aesthetic and philosophical principle in the Middle Ages. While the sheer density of scholarship to contend with on the conception of abstraction in modern and contemporary art could easily lead to a methodological muddle, Gertsman and the featured contributors combat this potential confusion with precision, clarity, and discernment. In her introductory chapter, Gertsman pays particular attention to the importance of employing language deliberately. She catalogs and glosses terminology that "flit[s] in and out" of the gathered essays (20). Many of these terms are notably prefixed with non-, and are thus defined in large part as negations—by an absence of one thing rather than a presence of another. Overwhelmingly, these terms are loaded with baggage from their years of use in the context of modern and contemporary art. Gertsman foreshadows a major theme of the volume, saying that "each essay toils, on the one hand, to disentangle present-day terms from objects at hand, and, on the other, to formulate productive ways to think through and build up concepts of what medieval abstraction might and might not be, how it might be manifested, and how it might be described" (20). Pinning down what abstraction means undergirds many of the essays gathered here. Two chapters, the first cowritten by Adam S. Cohen and Linda Safran, and the second by Danielle B. Joynor, directly cite standard dictionary definitions of abstraction. For Cohen and Safran, the key quality of abstraction, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is that it is "free from representational qualities" (91). Joynor emphasizes the capacity of "abstract" to behave as a transitive verb meaning, "to take away, extract, or remove (something); to move (a person or thing) away, withdraw" (249). Another chapter, by Megan C. McNamee, explores the etymology of the word, from the Classical Latin abstrahere, meaning "to pull away" or "to separate," and its historical usage to describe the "severing of spiritual from worldly" concerns (271). Each author's distinctive emphasis on [End Page 253] a different side of the meaning of abstraction illustrates the exigent need for this volume. Throughout the essays gathered here, the contributors vary widely in the extent to which they integrate or grapple with modern and contemporary terms and concepts of abstraction. Danny Smith, for example, explicitly cites Barnett New-man's explanation of the impetus—both for himself and for contemporaries such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt—toward abstract color field paintings: "shape was a complex living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable" (144). Carefully, though, Smith excises Newman's definition of an "ideograph" from its original context. Smith instead aims to adopt the term. Despite being coined in relation to color field painting specifically, Smith identifies its potential to elucidate other art, from other times: namely, swaths of color, a later addition to the Ashburnham Pentateuch (6th c., with 9th-c. repainting), purposefully deployed to obfuscate figures in an illumination. As demonstrated time and again throughout this volume, discussions of abstraction as a vehicle for meaning in the medieval period are often saddled with a responsibility nearly never demanded of scholars in assessments of abstraction after 1900: the need to contend seriously with the possibility that a lack of figuration is mere error on the part of artist or patron. Different contributors to this volume afford more or less attention to the task of proving the intentionality behind the occasions of abstraction highlighted throughout these chapters. Vincent Debiais, for example, only briefly acknowledges, and then sets aside, the possibility that unadorned, framed purple color fields in...

«Io giungo all’essere e a me stesso». Le prime opere di Francesco Lo Savio, 1957-1959


 
 
 The main aim of the article is to explain the beginning of the Roman painter Francesco Lo Savio’s career from 1957 to 1959. This part of his production has long been unknown because it was considered too distant from the mature works. During those years Lo Savio is still tied to his training in Informal Art. Moreover, the work of this period also show influences coming from American art, in particular, from the pictorial research of Mark Rothko. This essay illustrates why these works should be considered an important step, although germinal, in Lo Savio’s painting career. Just by analyzing the origins of his painting, it is possible to understand the next steps of his work. The works at the end of 1958 and early 1959 are, in fact, the start of his artistic path that will result in Space-Light paintings a few months later.