Lot Essay
Since 1943, when he had made a statement in a letter to the New York Times, Mark Rothko had been searching to create through his work a transcendental experience that involved release from the banality of the human experience. He wanted his art to be able to create a self-transcendence, in which the sublime and tragic were inculcated in the simplest forms on flat canvases. Over the next fifteen years, he removed what he called "finite associations" from his works, and from the early 1950s he painted softly edged rectangles of color on large canvases.
In a statement honoring Rothko's work, Clement Greenberg wrote: "[Rothko's] big, vertical pictures, with their incandescent color and their cold and simple sensuousness--or rather their firm sensuousness - are among the largest gems of abstract expressionism" (C. Greenberg, "American-type Painting," Partisan Review, Spring 1955, p. 193).
No where is this better acheived than in Untitled, 1961 which was painted six years after Greenberg had made his pronouncement. It is one of a group of works that became increasingly simplified in both number and color of forms, enlarged to almost completely fill the canvas. Rothko's paintings, which had begun the decade of the 1950s with tiers of color in bands and oblongs had become darker and more serious by 1959, when he completed and then aborted the Four Seasons Restaurant Mural project (due to his perception of the disjunction between the setting and intention). In Untitled, 1961, we witness this transition between the brightly colored paintings of the 1950s and the emotional complexity of the 1960s.
The advent of the 1960s brought a marked change in the artist's palette. The development of a somber quality to Rothko's work both in his colored and black/gray paintings can be directly associated to the deeply held feelings and emotions that were of paramount importance to him. He wrote, "I am not interested in relationships of color and form or anything else... I am only interested in expressing the basic human emotions--tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on" (S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957, pp. 93-94).
An intense and meditative artist, Rothko viewed his work as a spiritual journey culminating in the creation of life and his art. Hubert Crehan wrote in 1954 that, "Rothko's vision is a focus on the modern sensibility's need for its own authentic spiritual experience. And the image of his work is the symbolic expression of this idea" (quoted in I. Sandler, Mark Rothko Paintings 1948-69, New York 1983, p. 9).
In Untitled, 1961 the overwhelming tonality is red, a color that enthralled Rothko. Diane Waldman wrote that,
Red fascinates Rothko above all colors as a carrier of emotion. No other color appears so insistently in his oeuvre from the time of the multiforms. It dominates Rothko's work of the fifties and sixties and, in fact, was the color of his last painting. Red is so potent optically that it overwhelms or obliterates other hues unless it is diluted or controlled by juxtaposing it, as Mondrian did, with equally strong colors, such as black and white or the other primaries, yellow and blue. But Rothko frequently uses it alone, altering its tonality according to the emotion and basic associations: it is identified with the elements and ritual--with fire and blood--and thus with life, death and the spirit" (D. Waldman, Mark Rothko, 1903-70, A Retrospective, New York 1978, p. 58).
In a statement honoring Rothko's work, Clement Greenberg wrote: "[Rothko's] big, vertical pictures, with their incandescent color and their cold and simple sensuousness--or rather their firm sensuousness - are among the largest gems of abstract expressionism" (C. Greenberg, "American-type Painting," Partisan Review, Spring 1955, p. 193).
No where is this better acheived than in Untitled, 1961 which was painted six years after Greenberg had made his pronouncement. It is one of a group of works that became increasingly simplified in both number and color of forms, enlarged to almost completely fill the canvas. Rothko's paintings, which had begun the decade of the 1950s with tiers of color in bands and oblongs had become darker and more serious by 1959, when he completed and then aborted the Four Seasons Restaurant Mural project (due to his perception of the disjunction between the setting and intention). In Untitled, 1961, we witness this transition between the brightly colored paintings of the 1950s and the emotional complexity of the 1960s.
The advent of the 1960s brought a marked change in the artist's palette. The development of a somber quality to Rothko's work both in his colored and black/gray paintings can be directly associated to the deeply held feelings and emotions that were of paramount importance to him. He wrote, "I am not interested in relationships of color and form or anything else... I am only interested in expressing the basic human emotions--tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on" (S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957, pp. 93-94).
An intense and meditative artist, Rothko viewed his work as a spiritual journey culminating in the creation of life and his art. Hubert Crehan wrote in 1954 that, "Rothko's vision is a focus on the modern sensibility's need for its own authentic spiritual experience. And the image of his work is the symbolic expression of this idea" (quoted in I. Sandler, Mark Rothko Paintings 1948-69, New York 1983, p. 9).
In Untitled, 1961 the overwhelming tonality is red, a color that enthralled Rothko. Diane Waldman wrote that,
Red fascinates Rothko above all colors as a carrier of emotion. No other color appears so insistently in his oeuvre from the time of the multiforms. It dominates Rothko's work of the fifties and sixties and, in fact, was the color of his last painting. Red is so potent optically that it overwhelms or obliterates other hues unless it is diluted or controlled by juxtaposing it, as Mondrian did, with equally strong colors, such as black and white or the other primaries, yellow and blue. But Rothko frequently uses it alone, altering its tonality according to the emotion and basic associations: it is identified with the elements and ritual--with fire and blood--and thus with life, death and the spirit" (D. Waldman, Mark Rothko, 1903-70, A Retrospective, New York 1978, p. 58).