Page 22 - Studio International - February 1973

(Below) (Right) Barnett Newman
Duccio The Name II 1950
The Crucifixion Magna and oil, 108 x 96 in.
Siena Cathedral Museum Coll : Annalee Newman

never altogether transcend the anecdotal as do his Euclidian Abyss of 1946-7 as `my first Undoubtedly, for Newman and Rothko the
Rothko's and Newman's by the late forties. painting where I got to the edge and didn't fall proclaimed involvement with primitivism and
There is always a strong, somewhat 'French' off'.59 mythology was in part a strategy designed both
reliance upon displayed characteristics of The decisive point in Rothko's development to protect them from and to elevate the
facture : one texture or colour or form or motif came in oil paintings of 1947, when his status of their paintings above the banal
against another; never quite the `sense of the choices of colour were finally freed from contingencies and the trivializations of social
whole thing' achieved so consistently by considerations of the vestiges of descriptive life. Still's misanthropy can be seen as having a
Rothko and Newman from 1948 onward. functions. The 'soft-space' hues of his pre-1947 similar function. 'With us the disguise must be
Rothko had experimented with automatism watercolours swallowed up his biomorphs and complete. The familiar identity of things has to
in the early forties, like so many others, and like assumed the organization of the surface. be pulverized in order to destroy the finite
Pollock in the mid forties was drawn to Miró. At the moment of transition in his painting associations with which our society increasingly
In Rothko's works of 1945-6 there is a from 'biomorphic' to 'colour-field' abstraction, enshrines every aspect of our environment.'
reminiscence of those of Miró's works of the Rothko wrote of `the shapes in the pictures' as (Rothko, 194763)
twenties in which schematic and calligraphic `performers . . created from the need for a They expected, in certain respects, to be
forms are simultaneously floated upon and group of actors who are able to move solitary (as, in a very real sense, they were"),
embedded in a 'soft', 'deep', 'opaque' ground. dramatically without embarrassment and and they knew their work would reflect this.
The strictly horizontal divisions of Rothko's execute gestures without shame', and of the The transaction between painting and
mid-forties watercolours, such as Geologic need for 'everyday acts' to belong to 'a ritual spectator was envisaged as essentially private
Reverie of c. 1946, function as do the horizons accepted as referring to a transcendent realm'.60 and intimate; the 'man-sized' paintings which
of Miró's mid-twenties landscapes, as a means of The (crudely) Jungian rather than Freudian Rothko and Newman painted from 1949
dividing the painting laterally into zones, thus interpretation of the unconscious in the work of onward were designed to be seen from close
evading, as did Newman by comparable Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Gottlieb to65 in a context which encouraged silence and
means, the problem of recession relative to all reflected certain aspects of the ambitions they absorbtion. `. . I realize that historically the
four framing edges. (This problem had had in common. When they wrote, they wrote of function of painting large pictures is painting
survived Cubism.) In Rothko's mature work `rituals' rather than 'relations'. They were not something very grandiose and pompous.
close tonal relationships across horizontal so much concerned to draw attention to the The reason I paint them however - I think it
divisions between large rectangular areas of pathos of isolation and insecurity in man's applies to other painters I know - is precisely
colour serve similarly to prevent the centre of relationships with man as to embody the because I want to be very intimate and human.
the painting from 'receding into depth' relative priority of the `aesthetic act' over the `social'.61 To paint a small picture is to place yourself
to the corners. In 'taking the whole painting' Hence, in large part, their involvement - outside experience, to look upon an experience
right out to the edges and into the corners, emphatic in the early and mid forties, less as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass.
Rothko, Newman, Pollock and Still achieved a self-conscious after about 1948 - in archaic However you paint the larger picture, you are in
degree of integration of their images which had mythology, in romantic anthropology and in it. It isn't something you command.' (Rothko,
been beyond even Braque and Picasso at their primitive art62; hence also their subsequent 195166) 'I paint large pictures because I want
best. Hess records that Newman once described move away to a more 'absolute' position. to create a state of intimacy. A large picture is an
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