[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!

[Republicanprofessor]

I guess that Rothko stuff doesn't even have a subject? Perhaps that is one of its problems in my mind.

Posting this reply to the Rothko thread....

Rothko's subject, according to something he wrote with Gottlieb, is the "tragic and timeless." I would say that any interpretations with blood, violence, and death is it. He painted his works large so that they could be intimate, and when you see one in person, they do fill the view all around you, and you feel the pulsing color almost physically.

There is a story that in his Russian family, at the end of the 19th century, the czar's soldiers came into his Jewish village and took all out to dig a large grave. Then they were shot and placed in the grave.

It may be an apochryphal story, but Rothko repeated it himself. I often think of the large blocks in his other works as grave-like and that the way the colors pulse is like a doorway to the beyond.

That's how they strike me: as quite deep, human, and tragic.

I'm copying this to the Rothko thread, BTW. (Also note: Rothko emigrated to the US with his family when he was ten.)