archiverothko

Mark Rothko, (American, b. Russia, 1903-1970), Untitled, 1969, Acrylic on canvas, 172,7 x 152,4 cm, John and Mary Pappajohn, Des Moines, Iowa.

Mark Rothko, (American, b. Russia, 1903-1970), Mural, Section 3, (Black on Maroon), 1959. Oil on canvas. 266,7 x 457,2 cm. Tate Gallery. London.

Mark Rothko's Last 12 Years and the Seagram Murals

Mark Rothko, (American, b. Russia, 1903-1970), Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, oil on canvas, 1949, Museum of Modern Art.

Mark Rothko, (American, b. Russia, 1903-1970), Lavender and Mulberry, 1959. Oil on paper mounted on wood fiberboard panel, 95.9 x 62.9 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Tate Modern
Bankside
+44 20 7887 8888
London
Level 4 West
Rothko
September 26, 2008-
February 1, 2009

Focusing on the final part of his career between 1958 and 1970, the exhibition will comprise around 50 works, including paintings and works on paper.

Bringing together an exceptional group of 16 Seagram murals, the exhibition will offer an unprecedented opportunity to experience this seminal body of work. For the first time in their history the nine Tate Seagram murals (known as the ‘Rothko room’) will be joined by a selection of related Seagram paintings from the collections of the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It will be the first time the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art will have lent their works to an international exhibition since they joined its collection in the late 1980s.

The Seagram murals will be shown alongside other landmark series of Rothko’s paintings, including major Black-Form paintings (1964), large-scale Brown on Grey works on paper (1969), and works from his last series Black on Grey, made in 1969–70.

Commissioned in 1958 the Seagram murals were intended to adorn the exclusive Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s newly built Seagram building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Rothko constructed a scaffold in his studio to create a replica space of the restaurant to work in. Though the original commission was meant to encompass only seven paintings, Rothko eventually painted 30 canvases.

The bright and intense colours of his earlier paintings made way to maroon, dark red and black, and Rothko soon realised that the brooding character of his latest creations required a very different environment to the one they had been commissioned for. Rothko saw the Seagram paintings as objects of contemplation, demanding the viewer’s complete absorption. He made reference to Michelangelo’s works in the Laurentian Library in Florence, with its deliberately oppressive atmosphere, commenting that Michelangelo ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up’. He took the decision to withdraw from the restaurant commission.

Shortly before his death in 1970, Rothko presented nine Seagram paintings to the Tate Gallery, citing his deep affection for the Collection, especially for JMW Turner. Displayed in keeping with the artist’s wishes as one coherent environment, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.

Mark Rothko is curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Tate Modern. The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in association with Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art and will travel to Japan in spring 2009.

Mark Rothko, (American, b. Russia, 1903-1970), Red, Brown and Black, 1958, Óleo sobre lienzo, 270.8 x 297.8 cm, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, The Museum of Modern Art New York, U.S.A.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Untitled (Archaic Seascape, Primeval, landscape), ca. 1943, Aquarell auf Papier, 57,2 x 78,9 cm, Collection Kate Rothko Prizel, © Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008.

Rothko's German Retrospective: A Lifetime and Two Decades in Coming

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Stiftung öffentlichen Rechts
Glockengießerwall
Hamburg
+49 (0) 40 428 131 200
Galerie der Gegenwart
Mark Rothko.
The Retrospective
May 16-August 24, 2008

The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism. Twenty years after the last retrospective in a German museum this show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle offers a unique opportunity to discover his outstanding oeuvre anew. In the face of the most recent developments on the art market, where prices for Rothko’s paintings have skyrocketed and considering the high sensitivity of the colour surface of his pictures and the challenging issues of conservation, the realisation of this exhibition marks a very special effort and a great responsibility to both the lenders and their works. A comparable opportunity to see Rothko’s oeuvre in this concentration and quality will not likely arise in Europe for a long time.

The exhibition comprises more than 110 works including more than 60 oil paintings on canvas and more than 40 large-scale works on paper. It presents works from all phases of Rothko’s career and allows the immediate experience of their intriguing and mysterious aura which no reproduction is able to capture. More than two thirds of the paintings come from the USA and the majority of these have never before been shown in Germany.

After his early interest in Surrealism, Rothko completely turned towards abstraction around 1946. In his multiforms, multiply-layered, freely composed, varying shapes of colour, he devoted all attention to the interaction of colour and shape in both the contrasts and harmonies resulting from their combination. In the later phase for which he is best known, Rothko most often arranged three horizontal, coloured rectangles with slightly blurring edges above one another. Like no artist before him did he foreground the expressive potential of colour alone — liberated from all narrative or figural elements — and in this way created paintings of high emotional intensity. Rothko himself said that his work was about the expression of the most fundamental human emotions with the means of colour.

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on (...). The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions ... the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them.”

Seen in a surrounding of dimmed lighting and viewed from a close distance, these paintings unfold their overwhelming power and their capacity to dissolve all borders. As the exhibition reveals, the glowing, intensely coloured and highly emotional paintings have lost nothing of their fascination and immense power of attraction.

Mark Rothko. The Retrospective presents the paintings of the American painter within an unusual context. Two historical precursors mark the poles between which Rothko struggles for his abstract visual language: On one side there is the Romantic European legacy of Caspar David Friedrich. In his landscapes the viewers (their place in the paintings taken over by the figures shown from the back) are drawn into the revelation of a space of personal emotion and reflection very much comparable to Rothko’s paintings. This comparison can be made directly in the exhibition where Rothko’s large intensely colourful abstractions are hanging right next to paintings by Friedrich like the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817).

On the other side there is painting as practiced by Pierre Bonnard, the famous modern French painter of the Nabis School, whose works are flooded by the sensuous colours and bright light of the Mediterranean and who took part in modernity’s effort to liberate colour from its representational function and to foreground, instead, its presence and radiance within the artwork. The paintings by Bonnard selected for this exhibition clearly show how Rothko, who had seen Bonnard’s pictures in New York, picked up the special quality of Mediterranean painting in his colour field painting.

The exhibition closes with a perspective on the traditions relevant for contemporary American art and shows the late Black-and-Gray paintings which give an idea of the bewilderment and despair that Rothko sensed late in his life. They mark an end and also a beginning. Right next to two late Black-and-Gray Rothkos, Richard Serra’s only remaining led-splashing "Measurements“ of Time. (Seeing is believing) reveals a surprising formal similarity and an affinity in content: Both artists are moved by a deep desire to transcend boundaries.

Curators of the exhibition are Professor Dr. Hubertus Gaßner and Oliver Wick who has already been responsible for the Rothko Retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Balse in 2001.

It is most of all due to the help of the children of the artist, Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel that the Hamburger Kunsthalle has been able to organize this exhibition and to acquire loans from all over the world, a support for which our institution is deeply grateful.

To accompany the exhibition a substantial catalogue with texts by Gottfried Boehm, Hubertus Gaßner, Christiane Lange, Karin Koschkar and Oliver Wick will be published by the Hirmer Verlag.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Entrance to Subway (Subway Station / Subway Scene), 1938, Öl auf Leinwand, 86,4 x 117,5 cm, Collection Kate Rothko Prizel, © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher, Rothko / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008.