#illuminations past and present in the painting of mark rotho

[eternal--returned]

Seven months or so after Rothko concluded his second European sojourn, which included four weeks in Rome, the Houston-based art patrons John and Dominique de Menil paid Rothko the first of what would be many visits. In February 1960, the couple met him at his Bowery studio to see the paintings he had intended for the Four Seasons restaurant in the newly completed Seagram building, an edifice designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson to present high modernist architecture in terms of maximally luxurious effects. Within weeks of returning from Europe, Rothko had withdrawn his paintings from their originally intended destination in that environment of princely splendor and conspicuous consumption. This act of principled renunciation impressed the de Menils, who were also captivated by the Seagram canvases themselves; later, Dominique de Menil would remember, 'They made for an extraordinary mystical environment, a mix of intimacy and transcendence that can be found in certain churches, certain mosques'. Two days after their first visit, the de Menils returned to Rothko's studio to propose acquiring the canvases for a future Catholic chapel to be built on the campus of the University of St Thomas in Houston, an institution they served as prime benefactors. But both the artist and his prospective patrons agreed that the significance of the undertaking would require freshly conceived art. And there the idea rested for another four years.

Thomas Crow ֍ "Illuminations Past and Present in the Painting of Mark Rothko." Toward Clarity (2019)

Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas

[eternal--returned]

To the extent that the cloister sculpture of Silos pointed toward the anatomical naturalism and poise of the Renaissance ideal, Rothko turned his back on that side of Schapiro's dialectic. The curator Katherine Kuh, who organized Rothko's first major museum exhibition in 1954, recalled that he "found most painters of the past, Turner and Rembrandt excepted, slightly distasteful, even denouncing Piero della Francesca as producing nothing more than 'tinted bronze.' . . . Indeed he deplored the whole Renaissance." The virtuosity of the Silos illuminators was not, as was the case in the Renaissance art he denigrated, monopolized by worldly human figures, factitious stand-ins for the transcendent. But Rothko had no illusions that the pictographic idioms of the distant past could survive uncontaminated by the peculiar ills of his own time. In the same Romantics essay of 1947, he writes:

The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.

Unfamiliar identities as well, like those of the Book of Revelation's outlandish creatures and personages, fell under the same strictures, which Rothko's choice of words—pulverize, destroy—laced with an imagined violence. The Spain of the Reconquista might seem as unsettled and dangerous an era as history affords, its fascination with cataclysmic end-times entirely comprehensible. But those living though the first half of the twentieth century could be forgiven for seeing their own era as unprecedented in the scale of its carnage and destruction. At the same time, the dominion of commercial expediency mocked any adequate depth of feeling with compulsorily 'finite associations. Anti-naturalistic diagrams of the Apocalypse made a suitable point of departure but could not persist as quotation or as merely transposed, surrealist-derived organisms. Successfully pulverizing his own 'finite associations' proved a halting process, but one in which the original components of the illuminated Mozarabic page survive and flourish in a transformed universe of forms.

Thomas Crow ֍ "Illuminations Past and Present in the Painting of Mark Rothko." Toward Clarity (2019)