Page 26 - Studio International - April 1972

Rothko exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in different colours would naturally make it so, or movement greatly preoccupied with its ancestry
London did not include any of the watercolour because Rothko intentionally emphasizes the and mythology as a whole, and with related
or tempera paintings that were shown in the brushmark at these points, with the effect of subjects like the history of alchemy, magic, and
larger continental exhibition from which the stressing the expansion of one colour across primitivism. Rothko was deeply interested in the
Hayward pictures were drawn. In the water- another. The paint's actual spread is virtually figurative images the Surrealist painters
based paintings his colour-building system is never enough to disrupt significantly the form of discovered in myth and used for their own
seen at its clearest and nuances of colour and the rectangle or the main structure of the purposes as equivalents for human impulses and
light represent more directly the constructive painting. Thus a tension arises, which is passions, as he was also interested in scholars of
process going on in the artist's mind. A tempera fundamental to Rothko's art, between the free comparative mythology, like C. G. Jung, who
painting like Red and Pink on Pink, which was in movement of the brush across the surface and understood something of the relevance of myth
the larger exhibition, shares with many of the the authoritarian framework of the painting as a for contemporary man. Rothko's move to
late watercolours of Turner a feeling of areas of whole. abstraction was not specifically a rejection of
colour expanding and contracting, modifying This kind of painting was worked out in Surrealism, but of figuration as a whole as a tool
and influencing one another and themselves, to response to the art situation in New York in the for the artist in American society. He wrote in
some extent controlling the format of the picture 1940s. Around 1940 Rothko had exchanged a 1947 of the way archaic societies were able to
instead of being wholly subject to it. Like form of representational painting, which often accept from their artists strange images of
Turner's watercolours, Rothko's pictures are depicted a figure or figures in an urban setting, monsters and gods as metaphors for feelings and
dependent on detail in the use of colour but for a softer, semi-abstract, Surrealist-inspired experiences. 'But with us,' he said, 'the disguise
transcend particular objects. In both, painting, often carried out in watercolour. It has must be complete. The familiar identity of
movement and development on a small scale frequently been pointed out that the emigré things must be pulverized, in order to destroy
over the whole surface suggest the possibility of Surrealists from wartime Europe were a major the finite associations with which our society
an over-all unity. With Rothko brushwork is stimulus to the younger American painters. As a increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our
suggestive rather than certain. The brush feels painter Rothko may well have felt reserved about environment.'9
its way over the rectangles towards a border with Surrealism as he came to recognize the fact, now This is a condemnation of American society,
another colour. At this point the brushwork is obvious, that it was the final, academic, phase of not of Surrealism. But it meant, nevertheless,
often clearest, either because the meeting of two Surrealism that the Americans encountered, the that the images of strange monsters and gods in
art that he knew and liked, whether the art of
Max Ernst or the American Indian, were no
longer acceptable metaphors for feelings and
experiences. It is important to understand the
terms in which he actually rejected metaphor.
In his joint declaration with Gottlieb, made in
his pre-abstract period, he had stressed the need
for subject matter in painting. In his
subsequent search for directness of expression
figuration disappears, and a simple format is
designed to give a straight entry into the artist's
mind. The detail of the picture still represents
the artist's feelings and experiences, but no
longer as metaphor, since the painting is its
detail, and is not a body of external images
introduced to help carry its meaning. This
elimination of metaphor does not entirely
identify Rothko with Abstract Expressionism.
Though he saw his paintings while they were
being made as organisms that could develop in
numerous different ways, he also saw their
creation as subject to a purposive and intelligent
will.
The Hayward exhibition opened at the
point (1948) when Rothko was still engaged
in pulverizing recognizable objects. It was a
weak starting point; the 1948 paintings are
difficult to look at, indecisive and amorphous,
and very much part of the conscious search for
an alternative to semi-abstract Surrealism. It
would have been wiser to have started earlier,
or slightly later with the breakthrough to
unequivocal abstraction. In the 1948 paintings
Rothko experiments with many different
colouristic and textural arrangements within
each picture, thin paint against thick, luminous
against dense, all with a very loose sense of how
to use the boundaries of the canvas as a form of
control. Rothko said of his paintings in 1947
that 'they have no direct association with any
particular visible experience, but in them one