By Margaret Regan
TWO PAINTINGS BY Mark Rothko in the UA Museum of Art's permanent collection provide an interesting end note to its current traveling show, Mark Rothko, The Spirit of Myth: Early Paintings from the 1930s and 1940s.
The UA's two works are in the familiar style of Rothko's mature years. In these dazzling oils on canvas, soft-edged rectangles of saturated color float ambiguously against colored backgrounds. "Green on Blue," from 1956, has luscious green and orange-white shapes, separated by a strip of deep blue, drifting in front of a field of pale grey-blue. The other, an untitled painting from 1970, follows the same basic format but this time, bright red rectangles, intersected by white, reverberate against pale red.
Rothko, a Russian-born Abstract Expressionist who spent most of his adult life in the fertile environs of New York City, is famous for paintings in this style. Over the last 20 years of his life (he died in 1970), he made endless variations of the mesmerizing colored rectangles. They're meant to offer the viewer a transcendent experience. Uncluttered by representation, the shapes and colors of the paintings reward the viewer with what Rothko called a "mystical jubilation," not unlike the ungraspable experience of music. Full of grace and sureness, these paintings might seem to have sprung full-blown of Rothko's psyche. But the little traveling show from the National Gallery of Art demonstrates otherwise.
This fascinating exhibition of some 24 paintings chronicles the painter's early and middle years. Paintings virtually unknown to those of us who have never studied the complete Rothko show his experimentation with a wide range of styles, from a Rothko version of German Expressionism to his variety of Surrealism, and even an eccentric rendition of ancient art. It's tempting to look at the sequence of paintings as an inevitable progression toward Rothko's mature Abstract Expressionism, but that would be unfair. The youthful painter of the '30s certainly didn't know what kind of art he'd be producing in the '50s. Some of the paintings hint that he could easily have gone in different directions. Still, you can trace some consistent preoccupations all along, and tease out precursors of the shape of things to come.
Accompanied by an informative catalog written by Christoph Grunenberg, the show begins with tense figure paintings from the 1930s. Painted in a style influenced by the German Expressionists, these opinionated pictures of stressed-out people are set in the claustrophobic confines of the modern city. "Subway," from 1936-39, is a bleak, monochromatic painting of alienated urbanites gathered in the underground station. Stripped of all flesh, these people have been stretched out into weak, attenuated bodies incapable of action. "Street Scene" is a richly colored, imaginative rendering of the street canyons of New York. Looming skyscrapers, under a bilious green night sky, trap the hapless figures in the foreground.
Though Rothko was dipping into the subject matter of the American social realists, his painting style was quite different. More distorted and more emotionally charged, it relied on the psychological dimensions of color so important to his later work. And already, in Rothko's preoccupation with architectural spaces and geometrical compositions, we get a taste of the wholly inventive approach to space that would come later.
By 1940, as the world tumbled into war, Rothko turned to archaic art. His shattered versions of ancient art from Greece and Rome, filled with oddly distorted faces, were early efforts to harness the "spirit of myth." An untitled piece from 1942 has a monstrous creature with four classical-style profiles molded into one head. Painted in gray, it calls to mind the statuary of the ancient world at the same time that it elusively suggests the slaughter going on in Europe. Influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Jung, Rothko believed that ancient myths embodied "eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas." These archaic images, occasionally arranged horizontally in classical-style friezes, were often lined up against a background divided into simple geometric bands.
Rothko dramatically shifted his style again by the mid-40s. He began producing strange, Surrealist-inspired compositions filled with edgily drawn organic shapes. Whether body or animal or plant parts, these oddities swim against by-now characteristic Rothko bands of color in the background. The catalog tells us these multi-layered paintings may represent journeys into the subconscious. To me, they also suggest the savagery of the war. Several are painted in somber shades of gray, and some of the floating shapes look like mislaid organs or mutilated babies.
A few years later, Rothko turned away from the restless calligraphy of these works. Instead of a nervous line, the new works had painterly, blurry-edged abstract shapes. The banded backgrounds gave way to pure fields of color, staging grounds for the serene floating shapes of the foreground. These pictures, called "multiforms," were the final stage before Rothko embraced his rectangles. But they're beautiful in their own right.
An untitled painting from 1948, a big concoction of soft oranges, reds and pinks, is full of diffuse organic shapes that occupy the entire space of the canvas. Rothko's mature works, like those in the UA permanent collection, are a gift to the human race. But this stunning piece of abstraction is gorgeous enough to make me regret just a little all the roads he didn't take to their end.
Mark Rothko, The Spirit of Myth: Early Paintings from the 1930s and 1940s continues through February 26 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, closed Saturday. Admission is free. For more information call 621-7567.
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