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Rothko was explicitly a painter of ideas… One can feel them percolating under the surface of his somewhat amorphous abstractions.
A second irony concerns (Rothko’s) second wife. She was, however, an accomplished Illustrator. The psychological permutations of such a choice partner on the part of my father are too complex to delve into here. One can conclude, however, that a significant portion of the slights he directs to the applied arts stems from the pain of his first marriage rather than from the dictates of his philosophies of art.
One must remember that he wrote all of these philosophical statements nearly a decade before he began to paint classic abstractions…
He will struggle to ensure that his apparently vacuous paintings are filled with meaning and content.
Art is such an action. It is a kindred from of action to idealism. They are both expressions of the same drive, and the man who fails to fulfill this urge in one form of another is as guilty of escapism as the one who fails to occupy himself with satisfaction of his bodily needs.
Art not as a form of escapism, but by failing to perform are the subject is performing escapism.
The man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry so that he has neither time nor energy to occupy himself with any other needs than that of his human organism is by far a greater escapist than one who developed his art. […] He understands that man must have bread to live, while the other understands you cannot live by bread alone.
On Decadence:
Art is excusable only if it performs a specialized function in relation to some extraneous objective, and insists that the intention to perform this function is present when the artwork is executed. If it doesn’t meet these criteria is is repudiated as “decadent.”
Light then is the instrument of the new unity. Through this instrument the artist could elevate the particular to the plane of generalizations through the subjective feelings that light can symbolize.
On Plasticity:
There is no common agreement as to the exact limits to the meaning of the this word. Different groups at different times have used this word to describe attributes in a painting, and they have also described the shortcomings of a work by noting the absence of its plastic qualities. Never has the word been used as an indicator of undesirable qualities. That is, a painting has never been considered bad because it is plastic.
Our definition of beauty then, is a certain type of emotional exaltation which is the result of stimulation of by certain qualities of all great works of art.
I’m not sure. Obvious balance and symmetry can be dull and unbeautiful. Chaos and broken, even more beautiful.
“Rothko was a painter of ideas” - etymological roots of idea = “to see.” “Thus when a person understands an idea, that person says ‘I see’.”
Rothko’s art invites one to write, as I do here. His art, severely limiting direct descriptive elements, and thereby wordless, yet invokes a world in which the air is full of words and verbose injunctions. But here again, paradoxically, as such all things with Rothko, at the same time his art depicts and invites, Zen silence. To stand in front of a Rothko is to consider the possibility that when the material and the somatic are fully experienced, that is precisely when the spirit manifests to our senses, and such experience can sanctify our perception. In that moment of personal archaeology at the edge of the abyss, as we excavate and study the self with our tears, we are brought into the heart of tragic myths. The materiality of the paint is where the spirit can dwell”