[Republicanprofessor]

An interesting, although long, article on the saga of Rothko and the murals he planned for the dining room of the Seagrams building in NYC. Some rather unsavory aspects of his character are revealed. But the description of the new Rothko room is wonderful. I had quite a powerful experience viewing other Tate Rothkos a few decades ago.

[Republicanprofessor]

Views of the new Tate Rothko Room, London.

I have not seen these in person, but they do seem to convey more violence and anger than in his other work. They are almost like jails.

[PBRSTREETGANG]

More art that I "don't get".

Don't worry. I'm sure it's me.

[agere_contra]

Oddly enough, as as I look at these essentially rather placid daubs, I do get a sense of violence and anger - against modern Art and its heavily subsidised pieties.

[Dustbunny]

You have to be kidding calling this stuff 'art'.

[LexBaird]

Here we are in the presence not of religion, but of something at once primordial and all too contemporary. On a notecard from the 1950s, Rothko had written, in his usual clotted style that yet makes his meaning entirely clear: "When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer & terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity."

It is exactly this sort of pretentious bullsh!t that extinguished the majority of my appreciation for later 20th c "art". And the equally pretentious author has the audacity to say this gobbledygook justification is "entirely clear". It is intentionally opaque. Yet, when you actually throw out the null language and b.s., it comes down to Rothko saying his paintings have no soul, and contain nothing but commonplace human existence.

[D1X1E]

Where's the breathless and gushing "you can see how he's suffered for his art" comment? LOL

[AnAmericanMother]

I don't like his stuff very much, and I think the only "violence inherent in the paintings" is cultural associations of dark red with violence, paired with Rothko's nasty personality. If I wanted to make up an alternative interpretation, I could interpret the dark red as being associated with a banked fire or working forge, and the straight lines the ironworker's bar stock, and praise the paintings as symbolic of the fire of creation and the birth of man's dominion over earth and iron . . . or something like that.

A lot of this abstract art seems to be more about what the viewer is bringing to the painting than what the painter put into it.

I'm not a painter, but I am a writer, and to say that his self-indulgent, opaque writing style "makes his meaning entirely clear" is just B.S. The impression it leaves is of an utter narcissist who was just seeing what he could get away with by being haughty and deliberately obscure.

[kittymyrib]

One's understanding of art is largely determined by what is in one's soul. Today's art is meager, misshapen and malnourished because it is a product of that type of soul.

[Dionysius]

Rothko's "art" is the glorification of paint chips.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Different strokes for different folks. I love Rothko, but I don't love every other famous modern artist. (Twombly in my opinion is filthy childish grafitti, for instance, and Rauschenberg does nothing for me.)

[SlowBoat407]

I visited the Rothko chapel on a trip to Houston and felt like I needed a hot scrubbing shower afterwards. There was something distinctly dark and disturbed in his work, and I wanted no part of it.

[Sam Cree]

"Great art can be fitted into the oddest places - on a chapel ceiling, for instance, or in a millionaire's bathroom - but it does seem remarkably brave on Johnson's part to call on Rothko..."

The remarkable thing is applying the word "great" to this stuff.

"In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy..."

That's because they *are* fuzzy!

[Tokra]

This work DOES speak to me - it reminds me that I need to clean my window screens now that spring is here.

[Pietro]

"...giving on to depthless interiors."

perfect

[Tunehead54]

This is art:

---

This is not:

At least in terms of post-modern abstract art ... ;-)

I'm still trying to figure this one - "fraught" with what? This guy needs an editor.

"Eventually, he decided instead to donate the paintings to Tate.

This transaction was also to prove fraught, for Rothko, despite, or, as is more likely, because of the great critical and commercial success that had come to him in the 1950s, tended to detect slights and veiled insults at every turn."