Rothko Research Articles

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World Andrew Wasserman Annie Cohen-Solal . Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Pp. xxv, 540. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 1400044278. Vanessa Corby . Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging, and Displacement. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. Pp. xvii, 250. Hardcover $29.95. ISBN 9 781845115449. David Kaufmann . Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. 118. Paper $24.95. ISBN 9780520265769. In his April 8, 1965 New York Times article "The Jewish Museum: What is It, Why is it, and What Next?" art critic Sam Hunter identified the uptown Manhattan museum as pulled in two directions: one, it served as a repository of historic ceremonial Judaica, defined by continued ties to the Jewish Theological Seminary; two, it functioned as an exhibition space for contemporary art appearing to "have no immediate bearing on Jewish affairs." This division was first announced in 1957 with the exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation and exacerbated by the show 1970 Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. One can still find it in this year's Kehinde Wiley exhibition, World Stage: Israel. Such exhibitions reveal a complex institutional definition of what constitutes Jewish art within greater contemporary art practice. In remarks in a1966 lecture at the museum, later published in Commentary as "Is There Jewish Art?" art critic Harold Rosenberg's declared, "First, they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art?" He proposed several possible criteria for establishing "Jewish art" as a specific category: art produced by Jews, art concerned with identifiable Jewish subjects, Jewish ceremonial objects, Jewish folk art and ephemera, and "metaphysical Judaica." With each category deemed unsatisfying, Rosenberg determined, "There is no Jewish art" if one attends exclusively to stylistic choices and practical function. Instead, he echoed Hunter's criterion of an "intellectual sympathy" that evolved from a Jewish Enlightenment culture and that accommodates challenging and novel art production. This attempt to align post-war American art with Jewish intellectual tradition simply on the basis of an under-analyzed, culturally specific appreciation for advanced culture is troubling to say the least. Rather than tackle the topic of a "Jewish art" from the standpoint of stylistics and utility (too limited) or [End Page 71] intellectual rigor (too broad), it is perhaps better to query the practitioners at this subject's center. Recent attempts at canon formation have generated lists including standard mid-century figures of Jewish-American heritage, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, and Leonard Baskin. However, as the exhibition records of the Jewish Museum demonstrate, these lists demand amending. Three recent books—Vanessa Corby's Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging and Displacement, David Kaufmann's Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works, and Annie Cohen-Solal's Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli—offer the possibility of such an alternative lens. Each considers the career of a major figure of post-war American art whose work is informed by a rejection of, embrace of, or ambivalence toward Jewish identity. Additionally, the texts analyze how negotiating a multi-hyphenate identity in personal and professional realms under intense assimilationist pressures affected the reception of both the art and the artist within their historical age as well as today. Although not always successful as individual scholarly exercises, these texts collectively propose substituting a "Jewish art" world defined by aesthetic-based typologies for a Jewish "art world," to borrow Howard Becker's term. Beyond just artists, an art world expands to include the collectors, curators, dealers, critics, and historians who contribute to the creation, presentation and reception of artwork. This world runs alongside and intersects with a greater post-war Jewish American culture. As such, it offers an opportunity to consider this art world's relevance to shifting definitions governing what constitutes contemporary Jewish art. Corby provides an ambitious study of the connections between gender, ethnic, and religious heritage, and personal trauma, that shaped not only Eva Hesse's work, but also scholarship about Hesse over the past four decades. The text merges Ann Wagner's important historically-grounded work on...

Control Over Emergence: Images of Radical Sovereignty in Pollock, Rothko, and Rebeyrolle

The form of life which has the desire for or will to control over emergence at its core is, if not the dominant, then at least one of the more significant ones in late modern culture. To be in control over emergence requires a considerable degree of sovereignty. In this contribution I have made an attempt to outline and contrast three rather basic images or models of what might be called radical sovereignty, i.e., the vital-reflexive-transgressive one (which is referred to here as Nietzsche type 1), the existential-reflective-transcendent one (Nietzsche type 2), and the ambivalent-creative-transformative one (Nietzsche type 3). The analysis of paintings by post-war artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Paul Rebeyrolle is used to illustrate how the aforementioned types of radical sovereignty may have emerged, fully-fledged, in art, in the wake of the Second World War.

The Next Fix

The Next Fix R. Sebastian Bennett (bio) OD: docufictions. Harold Jaffee. JEF Books. http://www.experimentalfiction.com. 132 pages; paper, $15.00. In OD, Harold Jaffe continues his striking, multi-leveled quest to expand sociocultural consciousness and renovate—if not reinvent—the modern prose form. Jaffe, editor of the literary journal Fiction International, has authored eighteen books of fiction and essays that have been translated and published in many languages. Much of his recent work incorporates the literary technique "docufiction," a blend of nonfiction and fiction which "attempts to ape the mainstream culture while deconstructing it," as Jaffe explains on his website, jaffeantijaffe.com. Docufiction has, as one of its goals, the presentation and investigation of a broad-based composite that addresses widely divergent dynamics operating simultaneously. In many respects, Jaffe's docufiction is a form far less restricted and constricted than traditional fiction, biography, or journalism, and more multi-dimensional than Wolfe's "New Journalism" of the 1960s or Thompson's "Gonzo Journalism" of the 1970s. Jaffe's docufiction, which encompasses manifold prose structures simultaneously, is read and encountered—wherein the encounter might consciously or unconsciously redirect entrenched/hackneyed cognitive paths; or docufiction may be fruitfully dissected to reveal layers upon layers of psycho-social forces active in any given individual or social sphere, at any given time. OD contains thirteen docufictions. As Jaffe explains in an introductory Author's Note, "Each of the 13 docufictions features a well-known personage who either died of an overdose or was invested in 'drugs' to the extent that they contributed to his/her death." Diane Arbus, Walter Benjamin, Lucian Freud, Sigmund Freud, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, Billie Holiday, Aldous Huxley, Jim Jones, Janis Joplin, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Bela Lugosi, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Rothko, and Jean Seberg are included. While OD features this broad range of personages, the book is much more than a series of character sketches. Using drug overdose as a metaphoric and analytical center, OD's narrative trajectory is omnidirectional; Jaffe's focus involves not merely the immediate circumstances surrounding the overdose, but the psychological attributes and historical events that defined the individual involved and constituted his/her legacy. Each docufiction starts off with a measured "dose" of a given character—a short, introductory passage. Then, in homeopathic fashion, this dose expands to become a macrocosmic expression of the psycho-social world the character inhabits and the nexus of forces, internal and external, which permeate the character and his/her environs. Clearly, the accomplishment of this is no small matter, and Jaffe employs a variety of prose structures, including fictionally treated historical events, (faux or parodied) interviews and soundbites, media quotes—often repositioned, historical overlays, and stream-of-consciousness commentaries, all woven together in a pastiche fashion which naturalistically reflects the various types of informational stimuli that comprise our media-driven terrain and our individuated responses to it. In "Freud Freud," OD addresses the nature of "truth" in a quote concerning aesthetic theory ostensibly uttered by Lucian Freud—and the narrative response it elicits: "When I look at a body it gives me the choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it." Almost immediately, Jaffe's narrative voice intervenes to point out, "Lucian Freud must not have bought into the postmodern paradigm of shifting, socially constructed 'truths.'" This summary of the variegated forms of "truth" is suggestive of the many types and levels of truth inherent in the book OD itself—a range which reflects the information/disinformation dichotomy which we all must address when confronting the media/techno/corporate/political morass that is so much a part of modern culture. Importantly, while Jaffe's literary expressions are innovative and divergent, much of his writing retains a smooth and beautiful narrative flow—rhythmic, efficient, and nuanced—such as this portrait of Marilyn Monroe in "Norma Jeane": When a man took her loveliness in his arms, he took his life in his hands! Her skin-tight red dress above the knees, steep décolletage, no underwear, her deliberate, dreamy, wiggling...

In the wake of trauma: visualising the unspeakable/unthinkable in Marie Darrieussecq and Hélène Lenoir

In the course of the last thirty years trauma studies has been one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields. Arising in part as a result of renewed medical interest in the effects of traumat...

Una ciudad dilatada por la luz

The purpose of this article is to analyze the function of art in the narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina. Through the interpretation of the narrative function of paintings by renowned artists like Cézanne, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Mark Rothko in four works, The Winter in Lisbon, The Polish Rider, Sefarad and The Windows of Manhattan, I will pursue the hypothesis that the works of art play the role of identity giving metaphors for the characters. At the same time the painting play the role of “entelechies” in the narrative structure, as well for the characters as for the reader, because it is only through the interpretation of the paintings that each narrative obtains coherence and plenitude.

The Form and Meaning of Threshold Imagery in Mark Rothko’s Mural Paintings

The Form and Meaning of Threshold Imagery in Mark Rothko’s Mural Paintings

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter Baron Wormser (bio) Among the numerous startling perceptions that those Englishmen and women who "settled" New England must have experienced was that they were in a wilderness that was utterly new to them. This intuition became knowledge during the endless skirmishes and forays that went with the taking of the land and that produced dread, terror, and curiosity. This awareness, one that is reflected in the name of the region—an England that is new and hence not at all another England—was the seedbed of the drama of what has come to be called America. The name implied the conflict between what should be here—pious white folk—and what was here—heathen Indians, wolves, fierce winters, skunks, poison ivy, and other deadly elements. It suggested confidence and hope, but it signified the siren of the new also—that which was not known and could not be measured. No wonder the settlers shook with anxiety and trepidation before their God even as they praised His mercies. Given the locale they found themselves in, He had better be merciful. The search for a mercy that might dwell in the very landscape distinguishes a broad range of American poetry in diverse modes: declarative, lyrical, didactic, anecdotal, vatic, imagist, epiphanic, elegiac, and narrative—for starters. More than one such poem has sought to meld the political sublime, the vision of a just democratic society, with the poetic sublime, the vision of a world that accepts the poetic imagination as a good in itself. Realizing this vision is a search that has distinguished poets as different as Poe and Stevens, Hart Crane and Donald Justice (and painters from Thomas Cole to Mark Rothko) and speaks to the American belief in a destiny, be it political or aesthetic, that can face down any conflict. The longing for a natural (yet God-given) comity is one that seeks the resolution of whatever dwarfs and waylays the merely human—that broad highway of misdemeanor and achievement that, as Henry James delighted in noting, older, more settled, less visionary and implicitly wiser societies, possessed of "a complex [End Page 76] social machinery," have taken for granted. The aggregate of all those individuals pursuing happiness is a vast yearning feeling—a voice that is great within us, to allude to the title of Hayden Carruth's anthology of American poetry. At its extreme the apprehension of the democratic sublime can turn an individual such as Walt Whitman into a multitudinous aggregate. Or so he proposed. The dramatic mode does not leap to the fore of any such consideration. It is even easy to forget there is such a mode. The story of America is supposed to be one of inevitable harmony—progress and religion working hand in destined hand. Poetry, particularly in the form of the personal lyric, testifies to the individual's unassailable, self-proclaiming worth, and is a complement to this vision, however hard it may be to make its metaphorical self heard above the commercial din. Yet there is a strain of American poetry that is stoutly dramatic and revels in what can't be resolved, what assails and doesn't back off. Its chief proponents are Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Though one may find risible the vision of these two people sitting in the same room together, much less talking to each other, I think they would have understood one another quite well. Each of them spoke for the integrity of conflict and against the lies that so frequently underlay resolution. In choosing drama, each spoke for a mode that was perfect for facing up to whatever the poet found in his or her way, however quizzical or slantwise that facing up might be. Each recognized that, as a method, drama derived sustenance from the intractability of other people and creatures, and did not seek to avoid history. Each poet accordingly had little use for suavity (the legerdemain of Wallace Stevens that Frost so disliked), preferring instead the often wasteful ardor of encounter, incomprehension, and confrontation. Each sometimes delighted in mockery, a form of verbal sparring. (Both had tart tongues.) As dramatists these poets were glad...

Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don't Get Stockhausen (review)

Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don't Get Stockhausen (review)

Estate Planning raised by the Cases of David Smith and Mark Rothko

Estate Planning raised by the Cases of David Smith and Mark Rothko

Museum Laboratories: Where Art Meets Science

Museum Laboratories: Where Art Meets Science

Pequena História do Azul

Among the conscience of the intrinsic value of the pictorial, it resides a continuum understanding of which is fundamental in the relationships and contradictions of succedaneum poetic acts, and they will be better understood as the better we think as M. Brusatin, in Order to «dedicate ourselves to the painting return». Reminding all that which was symptomatic and repeatedly hidden and deprecated by the draw - «the colour as decorative complement of the narrative allegory of art history», in our interpretation about Storia dei Colori, we follow the painting in its nature-temporal-space, seeing the “colour-image”, the “colour-shadow”, the “flux to light in white-opacity”. We count the intrinsic vitality of bluish life in people’s cultures; listening to it in its deepness, also in the singular profession’s act, as «once upon a time there was a time again, naturally, the once upon the time of being the Painter» as, for instance, Rafael, Kandinsky, Yves Klein, Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter.

Vectors

Vectors

Motiv slikarjevega ateljeja v delih Henrija Matissa in vpliv njegovega Rdečega ateljeja na slikarje v drugi polovici 20. stoletja

The studio motif was the central iconographic theme in Matisse’s oeuvre because it gave him the opportunity for introspection. In his fauve and experimental period, Matisse painted the studio without figures (the studio inventory itself), whereas in Nice he was interested in the relation between the (imaginary) painter, the model, and the beholder in the studio. The greatest masterpiece of all of Matisse’s studio pictures is undisputedly The Red Studio (1911, New York, The Museum of Modern Art), which represents a defining moment in European modernism because of its formal radicalism. No painter before that time had reduced a picture of such large format to a single color. Matisse’s intention was not to paint a picture of a real studio interior, but to create a painted equivalent of his emotional experience of his studio. With intense and evenly spread red paint, Matisse achieved a completely flat picture plane, thereby illustrating the idea of the spatial depth of the studio with the addition of easels, pictures, and sculptures. Matisse thus achieved something that seemed impossible: a flat impression of a picture that at the same time offers the feeling of space. With his The Red Studio, Matisse not only broke with tradition, but established a basis for a new tradition. The Red Studio has hung in The Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1949 and has become one of the most influential paintings of the twentieth century. It inspired the Color Field painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newmann, and Robert Motherwell. Some Slovenian painters also looked to The Red Studio and created several masterpieces. In spite of their quality, they were overlooked outside Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia, and were excluded from European art heritage. The most prominent Slovenian modernist painter, Gabrijel Stupica, did not directly rely on The Red Studio, but is linked with Matisse because of the fact that Stupica entered into modernism only with his picture of the studio as a two-dimensional space. In his pictures of studio interiors, Marjan Dovjak showed a sense for ignoring the depth of space, distorted proportions, and decorative forms similar to Matisse in The Red Studio. Bogdan Borčič also paid homage to Matisse’s masterpiece with his great monochrome pictures of studios. An examination of the studio motif by American and Slovene painters therefore shows that The Red Studio has preserved its inspirational power to today and will therefore remain an interesting topic for future researchers.

Against Indeterminacy

Unlike that of its main precursor Abstract Expressionism, the academic discourse surrounding Pop Art has not undergone an extensive social–historical revision. While it has become almost second nature for many scholars to examine the art of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, for instance, in terms of Cold War politics or mid-century conceptions of masculinity, Pop Art, when considered within its specific historical conditions, is often addressed in terms of the rather predictable (if undeniably relevant) burgeoning postwar commodity culture. With the exception of the work of Andy Warhol and a few significant studies of other artists associated with the movement, Pop, like its historical counterpart minimalism, has been frequently treated as a homogeneous occurrence, sacrificing fundamental differences various artistic practices and, equally important, preventing close analysis of individual works. Certainly a key factor to this paucity of visual and historical interpretation can be located in the works themselves. From Jasper...

'Chair Creaks, Though No One Sits there': Decomposition and Liquidity

How to describe and analyse a process from within, without self-aggrandisement, without exaggeration, yet engage a dispassionate listener? How to remember each small incident that influenced the outcome, and how to recall significant moments of revelation or realisation from the past, recent and distant, the pressure they may have exerted on the making of a single work? These are discursive notes, perhaps addressing the subject. The work may have begun in a room, though this seems unlikely. If it did begin in a room, then the room may have been quiet; if that were the case (which I'm inclined to accept for the sake of argument) then that quiet room was not just one room, because quiet rooms build up in your life: rooms within rooms within rooms, rooms in dreams, and now virtual myspace rooms and chat rooms. All these rooms were themselves enfolded within unfamiliar rooms that age barely remembers (or chooses to forget): those rooms of dread and pleasure, action and boredom, safety and danger. Their atmosphere accumulates, standing in relation to the feeling of being in rooms when something big was at stake: classroom, exam room, bedroom. 'Clocks spring to mind', I began to write (until realising that springing insinuates itself into the text as a pun, and puns are not my style, but clocks once defined the feeling of rooms): clocks ticking, measuring time, slowly, quietly, a presence, an interior atmosphere, dividing time with their chimes, then resuming their steady plod through ... what exactly? Each tick and tock seemed to freeze time, and if the clock stopped then the feeling of a room would change, dramatically. 'The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long,' wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob's Room. Indoor silence once was occupied, regulated and even articulated by a clock; it was not silence at all, of course, but the tick and the tock were paroxysms around which silence seemed to gather, like vultures round a corpse, waiting for the ungiven signal for decomposition. Now we have digital clocks, small battery operated clocks with a tick so fugitive that only paranoid listening in the middle of the night can search it out, and the visual noise but apparent audio silence of numerical displays on TVs, ovens, microwaves, computers and phones--so quiet rooms and the people within them now float within a more continuous and subliminal form of air. All of these devices radiate electromagnetic emissions, so their silence is illusory. With the right equipment, they materialise, just like the things of the air thronging H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. There are other small sounds; maybe they form wisps into solids, glue pieces into forms, keep people sane, or shield them from loneliness and the void. Georges Perec wrote about the man who stared at nothing, his radio playing at such low volume that no one really knew if he could hear it, yet when Madame Nochere went to switch it off, he stopped her. He listened to the hit parade every night: that was his claim. When I was a teenager, I listened to the hit parade at low volume, night, bedclothes, sleeping parents ... also indulging in melancholy, as is standard, and it being the 1960s, there was plenty of material to feed both needs. Poignant in its description of fragility, vulnerability, isolation bordering on chronic withdrawal, one of Brian Wilson's most revealing ballads, 'In My Room', described the bedroom as a world, a friend, a confidant, a refuge, an ear, a place of listening in which other people were absent. The lyrics, written by Gary Usher, were prophetic, since they anticipated Brian's notorious withdrawal into pyjamas--a bed-bound descent into the maelstrom of high calorie food, TV and cocaine that began in summer 1973 and ended in late 1975. Mark Rothko, also famously troubled, wrote interesting things about air. 'Tactile space, or for the sake of simplicity, let us call it air, which exists between objects or shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives the impression of a solid,' he wrote. …

Painting the page

As a way of creating a heuristic opening onto my practice I will make a rather naïve observation about the paintings of Mark Rothko. I want to suggest that because of the proportions of some of his canvases, the fuzzy rectangles of colour evoke erasures, censorings, concealments or veilings of paragraphs of writing. Running with this fantasy for a while, I go on to ask what kind of ‘writing’ this might be, and what it can tell us about the relative value of words and images in our culture. I throw the door wide open, giving a brief summary of the cultural symbolism of the book in the West. After that, I look at three paradigmatic critical readings of Rothko's paintings, asking what they might make of the presence of a phantom text, and how this can be related to the symbolism of the book. Finally, I suggest a supplementary reading of Rothko that draws on the East Asian concept of void, and ask what this can tell us about Rothko and how it complicates the earlier analyses of the relationship between the visual and the verbal. The concept of void has also come to increasingly inform my own practice as an artist, and so too has the notion of veiling or censoring signs. In other word, in the end, this long detour will be a way of talking about my own work without actually mentioning it.

ORANGE AND YELLOW (1956) by Mark Rothko (1903–1970)

ORANGE AND YELLOW (1956) by Mark Rothko (1903–1970)

Winogradsky Rothko: Bacterial Ecosystem as Pastoral Landscape

Made in the dimensions of a Mark Rothko painting, a steel and glass frame was filled with mud and water. By applying a microbiology technique developed by a 19th-century soil scientist, Sergei Winogradsky, pigmented bacteria that existed in the mud and water composed a landscape. As bacteria colonize their optimal zones, they change their environments by depleting their resources and releasing by-products. As a bacterial species reaches its carrying capacity, the environment no longer hospitable to the original colonizer may now be the optimal environment for a potential successor to that zone resulting in an evolving color-field of living pigments. The appearance/disappearance of color indicates both procurement and loss of finite material resources; the agents that act out upon the landscape and synthesize change become acted upon by their consequentially changed world. For this article, the ecological industry of the figure and field of Winogradsky Rothko serves as a point of departure for thinking toward a notion of ecological rationality.

A direct temperature-resolved tandem mass spectrometry study of cholesterol oxidation products in light-aged egg tempera paints with examples from works of art

Cholesterol ( 1) constitutes approximately 5% of the lipid fraction of eggs. The compound is therefore abundant in fresh egg tempera paints. The fate of cholesterol upon light ageing of egg tempera paint binding medium was investigated by direct temperature resolved mass spectrometry (DTMS) and tandem mass spectrometry (DTMSMS). Cholesterol oxidation products (COPs) such as 5,6-epoxycholestan-3-ol ( 2) and 3-hydroxycholest-5-en-7-one ( 3) were positively identified in light-aged egg binding medium. Given the fast rate of oxidation of cholesterol, the corresponding oxidation products are better markers for egg tempera than the cholesterol molecule itself. Cholesterol and COPs were discovered in paints on German baroque altar pieces from the 16th and 18th C and in a 20th C glaze on a Mark Rothko Seagram Mural painting at Tate by DTMS fingerprinting analysis of paint microsamples.

Rothko's methods revealed

Rothko's methods revealed