5 ms·

I know, I'm a philistine, but I have never understood the allure of Rothko paintings. Yay, colors in big blocks... I appreciate the efforts of painters who as

by douche 12y ago

I know, I'm a philistine, but I have never understood the allure of Rothko paintings. Yay, colors in big blocks... I appreciate the efforts of painters who aspired to photo-realism in the age before cameras far more.

sanswork 12y ago
I feel the same way about a lot of art but then I think about some clever snippet of code I've seen and how to 99% of the population it probably looks like gibberish and realize that sometimes you require experience and knowledge of a subject to appreciate its beauty. I think we're just in the wrong field for this specific form of art.
MattGrommes 12y ago
They really are different in real life if you've never seen them up close. As I understand, Rothko wanted people to stand right in front of them for awhile, to really have them take over your whole field of view. I never really "got" them until I did that, I was always much more aligned with you. As for photo realism, have you seen the movie "Tim's Vermeer"? It's a great look at a possible technique for that and the movie is very interesting.
- douche 12y ago
  There was a large Rothko mural at the school I went to for undergrad, and I dated an artist who loved his work for several years. I remain unmoved. On the other hand, in one visit to the Berlin Alte Nationaegallerie, I saw paintings that I will never forget. "The Iron Rolling Mill", by Adolph Menzel, "In the Troops Quarters outside Paris," by Anton von Werner. The Blinded Samson. These are truly masterpieces, to my mind.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    The irony is they're not really photorealistic. If you took a photo of those exact scenes you wouldn't get that look, because the light has been deliberately abstracted and exaggerated. They're actually more like vintage painted Instagrams, enhanced in an unnatural way for effect. E.g. The Menzel has obvious impressionist features, especially in the background and the smoke around the ceiling. The von Werner has very weird lighting, with a source behind the viewer, or possibly off to the left, or the right, and another equally bright daylight source from the room behind. This is not to be critical - they're both very good. But they both have abstracted light and form, and neither is a pure representation of physical realism. If you want photorealism, Van Eyck pretty much nailed it in the 15th century. Which is kind of the point with art - you get more points for inventing a new visual language, not for copying an existing one. That's why Picasso is so famous - he totally killed traditional representation when he was starting out. But it was too easy and boring for him, so he moved on to other kinds of painting and drawing. Modernism is partly about violently stripping away non-essentials, so first we had Guernica, then Rothko - and now we have Jony Ive and Material trailing along at the end of the trend, before everyone rediscovers 3D about five years from now.
    - smikhanov 12y ago
      You are right about most things here, but I'll add a minor remark: "photorealism" is an established term for describing paintings that have certain characteristics of a photograph, for example, depth of focus. It's a 20th century movement and in strict cultural sense, Van Eyck is not photorealistic (he sometimes was deliberately skewing perspective or objects proportions). Instead, Gerhard Richter's "photo art" is an earlier example of photorealism, Chuck Close is a later one. The most interesting thing about photorealism is that it actually opened new ways for painting, i.e. photography was used as a tool to better understand visual perception.
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        There's a difference between (photo)realism as a goal and Photorealism as a modern school. In art history, you won't often you find someone explaining what Estes, Close and those guys from the 60s and 70s were trying to do without also seeing a nod to Van Eyck and Vermeer.
- ollysb 12y ago
  This is the thing with Rothko, when you see them in books they do in fact just look like coloured splodges. That was very much my opinion of his work until I saw one in the flesh in the Whitechapel Gallery for the first time. It was just one but the presence it had was hypnotic. I recently went to the Rothko Chappel in Houston, a spiritual setting really is the perfect place to experience his work (note I'm an atheist).
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  As the old proverb has it, De gustibus non est disputandem (in matters of taste there is no dispute, or no meaningful debate is possible). I have stood in front of many Rothkos for a long time and found them rather trite. I don't hate abstract art; I love Mondrian (though I consider his art almost representational) and am quite happy to lose track of time staring at a postcard-sized reproduction of a Jackson Pollock, never mind the real thing. I'm an enthusiastic fan of Dada and Marcel Duchamp. I think I'm pretty open-minded where art is concerned. I think Rothko's stuff is art, no question, and that he has something to say. I have nothing against Mark Rothko, but I feel quite hostile to the critical establishment that has fetishized him into the role of cultural gatekeeper, using the reaction towards his work as a sort of socio-cultural litmus test designed to maintain a certain degree of inter-cultural homogeity. In short, I feel like curators make a big deal of him, though perhaps unconsciously, as a means of keeping people out rather than inviting them in.
objclxt 12y ago
I don't think that makes you a philistine. There are definitely some people who value art primarily on its technical merits, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some of my friends subscribe to a "if I could do it, it's not art" kind of system. But to me the most technically brilliant painting may lack the emotional impact of a far simpler work. Neither opinion is more 'correct' than the other, that's the great thing about art (and don't let any art critics suggest otherwise!). With Rothko the technical sophistication of the work isn't what you're meant to engage with (although really they are quite challenging to paint - they're not really solid blocks of color, and most people would find it very difficult), but the emotions it makes you feel. There's a great exchange in Mad Men between Sal (an artist) and Ken (an accounts manager) about a Rothko painting that's been delivered to the office. It sums up these two competing views of what art should be: Ken: "I don't think it's supposed to be explained." Sal: "I'm an artist, okay? It must mean something." Ken: "Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you're to feel something, right. It's like looking into something very deep. You could fall in." Sal isn't impressed by the Rothko, because he - like many people - thinks that art should either have some overtly obvious meaning, or be technically valuable. Ken thinks the art is a conduit to your own emotions and understanding, and its lack of inherent meaning doesn't make is less valuable. Neither is right or wrong here, and those two opposing views frequently clash in most creative fields. Rothko is to the art world as Cage is to music, for example.
hackuser 12y ago
One way to approach it: Color, and combinations of colors, convey information and affect how you feel about things. Imagine if you challenged yourself by reducing someting to only its colors; what could you express with it? What could you express with subtle variations? The first time abstract art made sense for me, when it suddenly clicked, was looking at a painting by Rothko. Art can be challenging, but that can be part of the wonder of it, to introduce people to entirely new, previously unimagined ways of seeing things.
munificent 12y ago
Personally, Rothko has been one of my favorite artists since I stumbled onto some of his work clicking through thumbnails on a shitty web site years ago looking for band posters to buy. I love photorealism, and some of my most memorable experiences with painting are from scrutinizing Old Master style works in art museums, but Rothko just scratches an entirely different itch for me. The first time I saw his stuff, even in a tiny thumbnail on a shitty CRT, the big bright colored shapes, simultaneously rigidly geometric and softly organic hit me somewhere in the back of my monkey brain. I found them soothing and a bit electrifying at the same time. I was really excited to see some in person at the Guggenheim, framed the way the artist intended. These massive paintings sit at ground level and when you stand in front, they become a doorway into something both desolate and calming. One thing Rothko forcibly reminds me is how neutered idea of color is in our day to day lives. We're so digital we tend to think a color is just some RGB value boxed in by the limited gamut of an LCD. It's like we listen to music only in 8-bit mono and have forgotten what more there can be. But if you see an actual painting in the flesh, done by a master who spent a career focusing almost entirely on color, you realize what a powerful thing it can be and how much more your visual senses can be stimulated than they almost ever are. Looking at a Rothko to me is like hearing a pipe organ in an ancient cathedral. Instead of a flurry of tiny precise notes that make you think "gosh, what a skilled technician", he just lays out one long, monumental chord that you feel in your bones.
- tveita 12y ago
  That's well articulated - sometimes looking at pictures you almost forget how real reality looks and feels. Incidentally, the color gamut of screens should hopefully improve somewhat with next-gen screens targeting Rec. 2020. But where it really gets interesting is if the next-next-gen starts approaching the full range of human vision. At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings.
  - munificent 12y ago
    > At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings. This may be true but it's important to remember that even then, the experience of physically being present with a work in a certain environment will always be different from looking at it in a rectangle in your room. Being there matters. Even if we have full immersive VR, there's still the experience of going there that's different.
bane 12y ago
I'm totally with you. To me Rothko is everything that's ever been wrong with modern art summed up in one person. He's virtually the worst of the worst well know modern artists. A pretentious, talentless hack who, with no discernible skill or even an interesting process or story, managed to ride a wave of modern art garbage that was fashionable for a hot moment and put him on the radar. He's as detestable as the people who made him famous, a group who turned the field of visual art into a talentless, skill-free, farce that the art world is only now starting to recover from, but has churned out tens-of-thousands of "artists" who think using words like "semiotics" and "human condition" while randomly rubbing paint on a flat surface produces something that moves us forward as a species. The only kind thing I think I can say about his work is that, like raw sewage, at least it's all instantly recognizable no matter where you see it. Huge "lookatmelookatme" canvases with squares painted on squares in whatever color the paint bucket next to him happened to have in it when he decided he need to make some money that month to make rent. Work laid on canvas in a herculean effort that must have taken no more than 60-90 seconds of the artist's labor and preparation -- cranked out with all the flourish of a fast food hamburger -- over 800 pieces. Being able to instantly recognize his work is important because it lets me immediately know to avoid that part of the gallery, it's saved me the world over, from the NGA to the Tate Modern. I sound like a modern art hater, but I'm not. There's a lot of great modern art out there, even some that takes quite a bit of work on the part of the viewer to appreciate. But I've never found anything even remotely interesting about Rothko's work. It has all the "art" of an amateurish custom bedroom paint job. I find it inconceivable that nobody has bothered to write the 20 lines of code necessary to just algorithmically generate an unlimited supply of this wall garbage. My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about. Heaven save us from modernists.
- ics 12y ago
  > My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about. Thought experiment: what if Rothko and other modern painters were the ones being conned? What if wealthy people, lusting for something different with which they could lavish themselves and the world (in their name of course), just needed a few naive but hopeful people who considered themselves artists or painters? What if, in exchange for money and acclaim, they were pressured to produce but never clarify for fear of losing their livelihood, feeling disgraced, or lost after spending so many years exploring a certain path? I don't mean for any of those to come off as loaded questions, just riffing on the topic while curious about how people here have approached the topic themselves.
bottled_poe 12y ago
Until a few hours ago, I would have little to say on this topic. I've been staying in Houston for the last few days and was lucky enough to stumble across the Rothko Chapel. From the outside it looks like any other single level brick apartment block. Once you step inside, the atmosphere is surreal. Each wall of this octagonal chamber presents an obelisk-like Rothko painting. Natural light is directed onto the grey walls via the obscured skylight. This visual simplicity combined with the silent environment perfectly presents what I get from Rothko work - mental clarity. If you get a chance to experience this place, I cannot recommend it enough. http://www.rothkochapel.org http://www.rothkochapel.org
DanBC 12y ago
You know the story about the commission from a restaurant? And he hated the idea and he wanted to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room"? That kind of shenanigan earned him some admirers. Also, they're pretty big. The sheer size of them males a difference. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VHMlBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=rothko+dining+oppressive&source=bl&ots=iwDsrQPExY&sig=2qYyvih8gwTUgeEsEtJY8r5CawA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=234gVfePB8KcsgHM8oLwCQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBg https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VHMlBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg...
mirimir 12y ago
The thing about photo-realism is that paintings can be more realistic than unmodified photographs. They trick the visual system. But now there's probably an app for it.

by douche 12y ago

sanswork 12y ago

I feel the same way about a lot of art but then I think about some clever snippet of code I've seen and how to 99% of the population it probably looks like gibberish and realize that sometimes you require experience and knowledge of a subject to appreciate its beauty. I think we're just in the wrong field for this specific form of art.

MattGrommes 12y ago

They really are different in real life if you've never seen them up close. As I understand, Rothko wanted people to stand right in front of them for awhile, to really have them take over your whole field of view. I never really "got" them until I did that, I was always much more aligned with you. As for photo realism, have you seen the movie "Tim's Vermeer"? It's a great look at a possible technique for that and the movie is very interesting.

douche 12y ago
There was a large Rothko mural at the school I went to for undergrad, and I dated an artist who loved his work for several years. I remain unmoved. On the other hand, in one visit to the Berlin Alte Nationaegallerie, I saw paintings that I will never forget. "The Iron Rolling Mill", by Adolph Menzel, "In the Troops Quarters outside Paris," by Anton von Werner. The Blinded Samson. These are truly masterpieces, to my mind.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  The irony is they're not really photorealistic. If you took a photo of those exact scenes you wouldn't get that look, because the light has been deliberately abstracted and exaggerated. They're actually more like vintage painted Instagrams, enhanced in an unnatural way for effect. E.g. The Menzel has obvious impressionist features, especially in the background and the smoke around the ceiling. The von Werner has very weird lighting, with a source behind the viewer, or possibly off to the left, or the right, and another equally bright daylight source from the room behind. This is not to be critical - they're both very good. But they both have abstracted light and form, and neither is a pure representation of physical realism. If you want photorealism, Van Eyck pretty much nailed it in the 15th century. Which is kind of the point with art - you get more points for inventing a new visual language, not for copying an existing one. That's why Picasso is so famous - he totally killed traditional representation when he was starting out. But it was too easy and boring for him, so he moved on to other kinds of painting and drawing. Modernism is partly about violently stripping away non-essentials, so first we had Guernica, then Rothko - and now we have Jony Ive and Material trailing along at the end of the trend, before everyone rediscovers 3D about five years from now.
  - smikhanov 12y ago
    You are right about most things here, but I'll add a minor remark: "photorealism" is an established term for describing paintings that have certain characteristics of a photograph, for example, depth of focus. It's a 20th century movement and in strict cultural sense, Van Eyck is not photorealistic (he sometimes was deliberately skewing perspective or objects proportions). Instead, Gerhard Richter's "photo art" is an earlier example of photorealism, Chuck Close is a later one. The most interesting thing about photorealism is that it actually opened new ways for painting, i.e. photography was used as a tool to better understand visual perception.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      There's a difference between (photo)realism as a goal and Photorealism as a modern school. In art history, you won't often you find someone explaining what Estes, Close and those guys from the 60s and 70s were trying to do without also seeing a nod to Van Eyck and Vermeer.
ollysb 12y ago
This is the thing with Rothko, when you see them in books they do in fact just look like coloured splodges. That was very much my opinion of his work until I saw one in the flesh in the Whitechapel Gallery for the first time. It was just one but the presence it had was hypnotic. I recently went to the Rothko Chappel in Houston, a spiritual setting really is the perfect place to experience his work (note I'm an atheist).
anigbrowl 12y ago
As the old proverb has it, De gustibus non est disputandem (in matters of taste there is no dispute, or no meaningful debate is possible). I have stood in front of many Rothkos for a long time and found them rather trite. I don't hate abstract art; I love Mondrian (though I consider his art almost representational) and am quite happy to lose track of time staring at a postcard-sized reproduction of a Jackson Pollock, never mind the real thing. I'm an enthusiastic fan of Dada and Marcel Duchamp. I think I'm pretty open-minded where art is concerned. I think Rothko's stuff is art, no question, and that he has something to say. I have nothing against Mark Rothko, but I feel quite hostile to the critical establishment that has fetishized him into the role of cultural gatekeeper, using the reaction towards his work as a sort of socio-cultural litmus test designed to maintain a certain degree of inter-cultural homogeity. In short, I feel like curators make a big deal of him, though perhaps unconsciously, as a means of keeping people out rather than inviting them in.

objclxt 12y ago

I don't think that makes you a philistine. There are definitely some people who value art primarily on its technical merits, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some of my friends subscribe to a "if I could do it, it's not art" kind of system. But to me the most technically brilliant painting may lack the emotional impact of a far simpler work. Neither opinion is more 'correct' than the other, that's the great thing about art (and don't let any art critics suggest otherwise!). With Rothko the technical sophistication of the work isn't what you're meant to engage with (although really they are quite challenging to paint - they're not really solid blocks of color, and most people would find it very difficult), but the emotions it makes you feel. There's a great exchange in Mad Men between Sal (an artist) and Ken (an accounts manager) about a Rothko painting that's been delivered to the office. It sums up these two competing views of what art should be: Ken: "I don't think it's supposed to be explained." Sal: "I'm an artist, okay? It must mean something." Ken: "Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you're to feel something, right. It's like looking into something very deep. You could fall in." Sal isn't impressed by the Rothko, because he - like many people - thinks that art should either have some overtly obvious meaning, or be technically valuable. Ken thinks the art is a conduit to your own emotions and understanding, and its lack of inherent meaning doesn't make is less valuable. Neither is right or wrong here, and those two opposing views frequently clash in most creative fields. Rothko is to the art world as Cage is to music, for example.

hackuser 12y ago

One way to approach it: Color, and combinations of colors, convey information and affect how you feel about things. Imagine if you challenged yourself by reducing someting to only its colors; what could you express with it? What could you express with subtle variations? The first time abstract art made sense for me, when it suddenly clicked, was looking at a painting by Rothko. Art can be challenging, but that can be part of the wonder of it, to introduce people to entirely new, previously unimagined ways of seeing things.

munificent 12y ago

Personally, Rothko has been one of my favorite artists since I stumbled onto some of his work clicking through thumbnails on a shitty web site years ago looking for band posters to buy. I love photorealism, and some of my most memorable experiences with painting are from scrutinizing Old Master style works in art museums, but Rothko just scratches an entirely different itch for me. The first time I saw his stuff, even in a tiny thumbnail on a shitty CRT, the big bright colored shapes, simultaneously rigidly geometric and softly organic hit me somewhere in the back of my monkey brain. I found them soothing and a bit electrifying at the same time. I was really excited to see some in person at the Guggenheim, framed the way the artist intended. These massive paintings sit at ground level and when you stand in front, they become a doorway into something both desolate and calming. One thing Rothko forcibly reminds me is how neutered idea of color is in our day to day lives. We're so digital we tend to think a color is just some RGB value boxed in by the limited gamut of an LCD. It's like we listen to music only in 8-bit mono and have forgotten what more there can be. But if you see an actual painting in the flesh, done by a master who spent a career focusing almost entirely on color, you realize what a powerful thing it can be and how much more your visual senses can be stimulated than they almost ever are. Looking at a Rothko to me is like hearing a pipe organ in an ancient cathedral. Instead of a flurry of tiny precise notes that make you think "gosh, what a skilled technician", he just lays out one long, monumental chord that you feel in your bones.

tveita 12y ago
That's well articulated - sometimes looking at pictures you almost forget how real reality looks and feels. Incidentally, the color gamut of screens should hopefully improve somewhat with next-gen screens targeting Rec. 2020. But where it really gets interesting is if the next-next-gen starts approaching the full range of human vision. At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings.
- munificent 12y ago
  > At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings. This may be true but it's important to remember that even then, the experience of physically being present with a work in a certain environment will always be different from looking at it in a rectangle in your room. Being there matters. Even if we have full immersive VR, there's still the experience of going there that's different.

bane 12y ago

I'm totally with you. To me Rothko is everything that's ever been wrong with modern art summed up in one person. He's virtually the worst of the worst well know modern artists. A pretentious, talentless hack who, with no discernible skill or even an interesting process or story, managed to ride a wave of modern art garbage that was fashionable for a hot moment and put him on the radar. He's as detestable as the people who made him famous, a group who turned the field of visual art into a talentless, skill-free, farce that the art world is only now starting to recover from, but has churned out tens-of-thousands of "artists" who think using words like "semiotics" and "human condition" while randomly rubbing paint on a flat surface produces something that moves us forward as a species. The only kind thing I think I can say about his work is that, like raw sewage, at least it's all instantly recognizable no matter where you see it. Huge "lookatmelookatme" canvases with squares painted on squares in whatever color the paint bucket next to him happened to have in it when he decided he need to make some money that month to make rent. Work laid on canvas in a herculean effort that must have taken no more than 60-90 seconds of the artist's labor and preparation -- cranked out with all the flourish of a fast food hamburger -- over 800 pieces. Being able to instantly recognize his work is important because it lets me immediately know to avoid that part of the gallery, it's saved me the world over, from the NGA to the Tate Modern. I sound like a modern art hater, but I'm not. There's a lot of great modern art out there, even some that takes quite a bit of work on the part of the viewer to appreciate. But I've never found anything even remotely interesting about Rothko's work. It has all the "art" of an amateurish custom bedroom paint job. I find it inconceivable that nobody has bothered to write the 20 lines of code necessary to just algorithmically generate an unlimited supply of this wall garbage. My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about. Heaven save us from modernists.

ics 12y ago
> My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about. Thought experiment: what if Rothko and other modern painters were the ones being conned? What if wealthy people, lusting for something different with which they could lavish themselves and the world (in their name of course), just needed a few naive but hopeful people who considered themselves artists or painters? What if, in exchange for money and acclaim, they were pressured to produce but never clarify for fear of losing their livelihood, feeling disgraced, or lost after spending so many years exploring a certain path? I don't mean for any of those to come off as loaded questions, just riffing on the topic while curious about how people here have approached the topic themselves.

bottled_poe 12y ago

Until a few hours ago, I would have little to say on this topic. I've been staying in Houston for the last few days and was lucky enough to stumble across the Rothko Chapel. From the outside it looks like any other single level brick apartment block. Once you step inside, the atmosphere is surreal. Each wall of this octagonal chamber presents an obelisk-like Rothko painting. Natural light is directed onto the grey walls via the obscured skylight. This visual simplicity combined with the silent environment perfectly presents what I get from Rothko work - mental clarity. If you get a chance to experience this place, I cannot recommend it enough. http://www.rothkochapel.org http://www.rothkochapel.org

DanBC 12y ago

You know the story about the commission from a restaurant? And he hated the idea and he wanted to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room"? That kind of shenanigan earned him some admirers. Also, they're pretty big. The sheer size of them males a difference. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VHMlBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=rothko+dining+oppressive&source=bl&ots=iwDsrQPExY&sig=2qYyvih8gwTUgeEsEtJY8r5CawA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=234gVfePB8KcsgHM8oLwCQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBg https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VHMlBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg...

mirimir 12y ago

The thing about photo-realism is that paintings can be more realistic than unmodified photographs. They trick the visual system. But now there's probably an app for it.