Page 24 - Studio International - February 1973

Juan Miró Mark Rothko `interior', the 'illusory space' of the painting,
Painting 1925 Vessels of Magic 1946-7 which is an actual condition of spectatorship
57 x 44 1/2 in. Watercolour, 381x 251 in.
Brooklyn Museum established by the formal characteristics of the
painting itself once we accept the
conventionalization of the possibility of a
`mutual' relationship. In terms of, and in
relation to, our everyday and contingent
realities, the appropriate orientation to a
painting by Rothko — the kind and degree of
concentration it demands — is equivalent to a
state of 'not-being'. This is perhaps an
asymptote of an 'ideal' orientation rather than an
`achieved state', but according to the
conventions of response to painting our
intuition can operate to 'bridge' the gap
between the two.
`Veils' of colour are scumbled one over
another — cool over warm, warm over cool,
cooler over warmer, warmer over cooler, etc., or
dark over light, etc. — to the point at which
`levels' of illusion become inseparable in a total
`soft', 'translucent' and essentially 'deep'
surface. As the sum-total of these modalities the
`identity' of the painting is impossible to
encapsulate.
As Rothko's work developed up to the point
The number of variables is astonishing terms this would have been idealist, self- of his death there was an overall tendency for
within what might seem so reduced a deceptive, irrelevant — but an alternative means his tonalities to become more tenebrous, his
morphology. In a large group of works painted of communion in a context which allowed for hues deeper and darker, and for the motifs — the
between 1948 and 1952, no two paintings have considerations of mortality (as the context, say, of often vestigial presences 'within' the canvas,
anything approaching the same qualities of Mondrian's art did not). 'A clear preoccupation areas which do not quite reach the edge at any
surface. At the highest level of Newman's with death. All art deals with intimations of one point — to become more inextricably
output the range is immense; between, say, mortality'.74 integrated with, or more equivocally related to
Cathedra (a 'deep' mostly purplish-blue If anything like an intimation of mortality can the 'field'. The conditions of spectatorship
painting) and Vir Heroicus Sublimis (a 'flat', be derived from Rothko's paintings — as I which Rothko's paintings imply seem, as his
mostly red painting), both 8 feet high and r 8 feet believe it can, in a suitably 'conventional' work develops, to involve a gathering silence
wide (two eight-foot squares plus two feet) and context — it is not in any 'religious' terms, but in and a progressive dimming of the light of the
both completed in 1951. They are very distinct terms of that sense of 'surrender to the void', of `real' world by which we see them.
paintings. allowing oneself to be absorbed into the
Newman wrote in a 'Prologue for a New
Esthetic' in c. r949: 'What is all the clamor over
space ? . . . My paintings are concerned neither
with the manipulation of space nor with the
image, but with the sensation of time. . .

io Mark Rothko
Rothko's paintings encourage a sense of
perceived 'mysteriousness' rather more than do
Newman's, largely because there is a greater
illusion of transparency and translucence in the
surface. It is conventional to respond to such
surfaces in such kind; this is an aspect of the
`ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent
realm'. It is important to remember that this
illusory space has its origin — not in specific, but
in general terms — in the 'liquid',
`metamorphic' contexts of Rothko's pre-1947
paintings; it is a 'world' of its own, or at least
serves as reference to an 'other' world.
Rothko's alternative to the 'tableau vivant of
human incommunicability'73 which was all
evident-subject paintings seemed to offer in
1947, was no celebration of other joys — in his

Mark Rothko
No 26 1947
Oil on canvas
33 3/4 x 45 1/4 in.
58