ART & ARTISTS

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Mark Rothko

I featured Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) in a previous blog post back in July 2010. However, I thought I’d revisit and extend it a bit in the context of the current posts on mid-century painters.

Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia). In 1913 he left Russia and settled with the rest of his family in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven, on a scholarship from 1921 to 1923. That year he left Yale without receiving a degree and moved to New York. In 1925 he studied under Max Weber at the Art Students League. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries, New York, in 1928. During the early 1930s Rothko became a close friend of Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. His first solo show took place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.

Rothko’s first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933. In 1935 he was a founding member of the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and Expressionism. He executed easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1936 to 1937. By 1936 Rothko knew Barnett Newman. In the early 1940s he worked closely with Gottlieb, developing a painting style with mythological content, simple flat shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art. By mid-decade his work incorporated Surrealist techniques and images. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This Century in New York in 1945.

In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s mature style, in which frontal, luminous rectangles seem to hover on the canvas surface. In 1958 the artist began his first commission, monumental paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave Rothko an important solo exhibition in 1961. He completed murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life on February 25, 1970, in his New York studio. A year later the Rothko Chapel in Houston was dedicated.

1944-46 Untitled

1945-46 Untitled

1946-47 Untitled

1947 Untitled

1948 No.1 (Untitled)

1949 No.3/No.13

1949 Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red)

1950 No.5/No.22

1950 Untitled

1950 White Centre

1954 Red, Orange, Tan and Purple

1957 Light Red Over Black

1958 Black on Maroon

1959 Black on Maroon

1959 Red on Maroon

1960-61 Untitled

1961 No.14 (Horizontals, White over Darks)

1968 Untitled

1969 Untitled

1969-1970 Untitled

Sunday, 13 March 2011

Norman Rockwell

Last week I went to the Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. There is a huge wall of The Saturday Evening Post covers and many original finished paintings and studies to compare them with. I was slightly surprised by the variation in scale, which had nothing to do with his age or time-line of artworks: some were very small and incredibly detailed, going right through to a single life-sized figure painted relatively crudely on a coarser canvas. A interesting show on the whole, which runs until March 27.

1953 Self-Portrait painting "The Soda Jerk"

Rockwell’s paintings were recognized and loved by almost everybody in America. The cover of The Saturday Evening Post was his showcase for over forty years, giving him an audience larger than that of any other artist in history. Over the years he depicted there a unique collection of Americana, a series of vignettes of remarkable warmth and humor. In addition, he painted a great number of pictures for story illustrations, advertising campaigns, posters, calendars, and books.

1953 The Soda Jerk

As his personal contribution during World War II, Rockwell painted the famous "Four Freedoms" posters, symbolising for millions the war aims as described by President Franklin Roosevelt. One version of his "Freedom of Speech" painting is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1943 Freedom of Speech

Rockwell left high school to attend classes at the National Academy of Design and later studied under Thomas Fogarty and George Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York. His early illustrations were done for St. Nicholas magazine and other juvenile publications. He sold his first cover painting to the Post in 1916 and ended up doing over 300 more. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson sat for him for portraits, and he painted other world figures, including Nassar of Egypt and Nehru of India.

1960 John F Kennedy

In 1957 the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington cited him as a Great Living American, saying that..."Through the magic of your talent, the folks next door - their gentle sorrows, their modest joys - have enriched our own lives and given us new insight into our countrymen."
The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts has established a large collection of his paintings, and has preserved Rockwell's last studio as well.