Mark Rothko

Like Untitled (Red, Orange), the painting Blue and Grey also shows two colour forms: one is painted in a velvety blue that wells up incandescently from remote depths, and contrasts with the other form, a fluffy white cloud of colour hovering above it, striking up a dialogue between the alternating states of floating above and sinking inside the picture.

Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown) manifests the reductive tendency of Rothko’s mature work in its most radical form. A single, sharp-edged rectangular field of blackish brown lies over the monochrome black ground. The works in this series of Black Form Paintings are painted black in black, with occasional nuances towards brown, violet blue and a certain reddishness. As the final consequence of his approach, the artist eschews colouration that might be misconstrued as pretty or even decorative. Black as a non-colour demands the viewer’s utmost perceptual involvement, kindles a relationship between viewer and object of consummate intensity. Only as time proceeds and upon closer observation, do the pictures’ subtle visual mechanics and the dialogues between brilliant and mat, between opaque and transparent surfaces become apparent. ‘Colourfulness’ is sensed only fleetingly in the materialization of warmth and cold, of red and blue tinges that have been seeped into the depths of the black. By preventing his pictures from ‘showing’ anything and removing any remaining obstacles, Rothko requires the viewer to rely exclusively on his own perception, launching him into an undivided dialogue with the painting. Regardless of whether this involves a single work or a group of works, the artist has thereby not only created a place – a locus, a presence – but has also lent conclusive form to his claim that he was not an abstract, but a “human and tragic” painter.