One of the highlights of the Scientific Program for the Winter 2006 Meeting, January 18-22, in New York is a presentation about the seminal New York School painter, Mark Rothko, by his son, psychologist Christopher Rothko. You won't want to miss this exceptional program. This article introduces some background on Rothko's New York and provides another way to explore the city during the meeting.
The art of Mark Rothko is powerful. To a viewer open to the experience of spending time in front of one of his large paintings, it can elicit emotions ranging from ecstatic joy to profound sadness. Through the careful calibration of color, shape, scale, and measurement, Rothko was able to create an experience of empathy through art. His colors—fiery yellows, velvety blacks, earthy reds, and a spectrum of others—seem to pulse and glow with an inner light. There are people who cry in front of his work. Rothko took pride in the fact that there were people who broke down in front of his work.
Ultimately Rothko felt that silence was the perfect response to his art. When the noise and speed of the city gets to be too much, the meditative act and intimate experience of standing in front of one of Mark Rothko's paintings can bring us back into the quiet contemplation of the human drama. If you leave your preconceptions behind and allow the light within these paintings to pulse before you, the large areas of color to envelope you, and gaze upon the human touch that Rothko has left everywhere in his paintings, the experience can be profound and powerfully moving.
During a painting career that spanned five decades, Mark Rothko lived and worked in many different areas of New York City. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, he lived in a number of small apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
While teaching art to children in Brooklyn and for a brief period working for the WPA (a depression-era federal work program that included artists) to support and feed himself, he searched for a language in which to paint. Early paintings were in a representational expressionist vein, followed by a period of working through surrealist techniques and mythological subjects.
Later, in the late '40s and early '50s, Rothko taught at Brooklyn College, while he and his contemporaries—in their studios as well as in coffee shops and bars—helped shift the center of the art world from Paris to postwar New York. As his reputation and canvases grew, so did his need for more workspace, and in his studio on 53rd Street (near his Sixth Avenue apartment, now the site of the Hilton Hotel), above a glass manufacturing shop, he created his early “classic” canvases of the early to mid '50s.
After a studio on West 61st Street was demolished, and replaced with Fordham University buildings, an unheated former YMCA gymnasium on the Bowery became the place where he turned to a darker palette. Here he also took on his first commission, creating his enormous—in size and number—Seagram Murals for the Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue (although the paintings were never installed).
At the age of 57, Rothko was celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, further solidifying his stature as a master of modern art as the exhibition traveled and was seen in six cities throughout Europe.
An Upper East Side First Avenue loft over a five-and-dime store served as a studio for a time in the early '60s. It was here that his Harvard Murals were conceived and created, well known paintings in the art world that, alas, are rarely seen because of their fragile condition.
His last studio was a 19th-century carriage house on East 69th Street. In this space he created his last mural commission, a group of monumental, dark paintings for what is now known as The Rothko Chapel in Houston. He also made his final paintings here, many of which were done in a somber palette of black and gray. Sadly, it was also here that Rothko ended his life in 1970.
Brooklyn, the Bowery, Midtown, Harlem, the Lower and Upper East Sides—Rothko's was the quintessential story of New York in the 20th century, a Russian immigrant child who became an artist who flourished against the textures of New York.
The city has changed a lot since Rothko walked the streets of New York, and many of the buildings he occupied have been razed to make way for the skyscrapers that now
Chris Broughton is APsaA's registration coordinator and a working artist. He holds an M.F.A. from Yale and has received many awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Broughton is represented in New York by the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.
dominate Midtown Manhattan. But you can still catch the pulse of Rothko in New York along the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile. In the museums that dot this part of New York, the great paintings of Mark Rothko can be experienced close to the places where they were created.
Please note that museums do rotate and change the work in their galleries from time to time. The paintings listed below are hanging in their respective museums as TAP goes to press.
11 West 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas
In the '50s, when Rothko had a studio on 53rd Street near the Museum of Modern Art, he visited often and would spend hours in front of Henri Matisse's painting, The Red Studio, purchased by MoMA in 1949. You can see this painting today at MoMA on the fifth floor, and then see work Rothko was making around this time. One painting is from his mythological/surrealist period of the early 1940s, two paintings are from his early classic period of two or three floating rectangles of luminous color, and in the contemporary galleries there is one black and gray painting from the last year of his life.
Second Floor: Untitled, 1969-70
Fourth Floor: Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944
Fourth Floor: No. 5/No. 22, 1950 (dated verso 1949)
Fourth Floor: No. 3/No. 13, 1949
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
In 1951, Rothko and 17 other artists posed for a photograph featured in Life magazine, which focuses on their refusal to participate in the Metropolitan's contemporary competition. The artists, and this notorious photograph, came to be known as “The Irascibles.” Now the works of many of these artists are gathered at the Met in the modern art wing of the museum, including three by Rothko. The three paintings include a bright, classic painting from the 1950s, a dark single rectangle painting from the 1960s, and one of his transitional “multiform” paintings from the 1940s.
No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow), 1958
No. 21 (Multiform/Untitled), 1949
Untitled, 1964
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
In 1998 the Whitney held a retrospective of Rothko's work. I saw the show at least eight times and was always able to find a painting that knocked me out. When I would return to the same painting to replicate a previous experience, it would offer something completely different. This is the wonder of Rothko's work. Currently at the Whitney in an exhibition called “Landscape,” there is one dark Rothko painting from the 1950s.
Four Darks in Red, 1958
1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
The Guggenheim, which held the first posthumous retrospective of Rothko's paintings in 1978, does not have one hanging as of this writing. However, the museum does have four excellent Rothko paintings, any of which could be hanging at the time of the Winter Meeting.