THE EXPANSE
WALKING THROUGH “MARK ROTHKO” at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton this past October, I felt in body, mind, and surely soul the magical embrace of his paintings, their physical presence, their frontal pictoriality letting me into their depths, and a powerful affirmation of the horizon between heaven and earth.
Rothko’s color defines shapes, his shapes define boundaries, and these boundaries are rarely hard. His colors glow from within and convey mood, emotion, gravitas. His shapes, weightless and hovering, stand still within the paintings’ borders. I perceive Rothko as an intuitive colorist compared with an artist such as Josef Albers, who used color scientifically.
I remember seeing an exhibition at New York’s PaceWildenstein gallery in 1997, where Rothko was installed in conversation with Pierre Bonnard, that painter of intimacy par excellence. It was fascinating to see how an encounter with Bonnard’s paintings back in the winter of 1946–47 triggered Rothko’s leap into color and light, how strongly Bonnard influenced his abstraction.
As the Rothko retrospective makes clear, he came from the romantic school of Goethe and the sublime, the lineage of J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Delacroix, and Frederic Edwin Church. Rothko’s paintings are large, immense in scale. I think of James Turrell’s debt to Rothko, and his own relationship to light, color, and the sublime.
Nevertheless, one is always aware of Rothko the painter at work, picturing the artist as he allows each canvas to develop without knowing where it may end. We see him, paintbrush in hand, layering paint, over and over, to achieve his unique surface, color, and field. In Rothko’s art there is “breath,” a favorite quality a painter friend from Korea spoke of when describing classical Chinese painting. Rothko’s paintings are not walls but openings to spaces where one can belong; he puts the viewer in a state of suspension and silence, where time seems to slow.
