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Lot Essay
Mark Rothko’s Untitled is an evocative painting from an important period in the artist’s career. Executed shortly before his death in 1970, it is an exemplar from a series of works which he produced following the important Seagram Murals. Rothko radically reappraised his earlier style after completing this important commission, paring down his compositional structure and employing a dark, atmospheric palette that exudes a striking tonal proximity. As such, Untitled fully articulates Rothko’s practice during this pivotal period, fully embodying his existentialist philosophy and reflective of the full measure of his acclaimed career to reveal the enduring possibilities of painting as a meaningful practice in light of modernity.
Evoking a sober sensuality, Untitled’s two rectangular panes of dark pigment rest like veils over a ground of hazy subdued amber. Demanding a close and committed engagement, the work slowly reveals itself to the viewer, with the complexities of the surface slowly emerging whilst layers previously obscured come into being in an intricate play of painterly sprezzatura. Paradoxically, despite its palette, the work radiates with an internal light, animating the space of the speculator’s encounter. The velvety interaction between the black and amber fields establish a perceptual challenge enabling the artist’s articulated brushstrokes to dryly confront the viewer.
Rothko shifted his working practice from the large oil canvases typical of the 1950s toward working with smaller acrylic works on paper after suffering an aneurism in April 1968, the evolution in materials allowing him a greater dexterity in making variations; the planar nature of the paper surface similarly led Rothko to dramatically reevaluate the relationship between the artwork and the support. The artist allows his paint to thin and drip in some areas, notably at the top of the work, accentuating the disparity between paint fields and between paint and paper. The signature horizontal line of thick maroon pigment bisecting the work functions as a liminal interval between the work’s two dark zones, thrusting a transient stasis upon his visual field.
The dark palette typical of Rothko’s later works have sometimes been erroneously ascribed to the artist’s failing health and long bouts of depression; this analysis fails to fully consider how this extraordinary body of work marks a consciously radical point of departure for the artist in which he reevaluates his entire oeuvre, reinterpreting his earlier tableaux to challenge one last time the existentialist struggle against his own painterly praxis. Representing what he regarded as the ultimate realization of abstract painting, Rothko employs his blacks and swarthy pigments against the conception of legibility, resolutely rejecting the validity of symbolism in order to fully explore the opacity of vision itself. Rothko’s close confidant, the critic Dore Ashton, describes this palette as an “exasperation at the general misinterpretation of his earlier work—especially the effusive yellow, orange and pinks of three years back. He seems to be saying in these new foreboding works that he was never painting luxe, calme, and volupté, if we had only known it!” (“Art” in Arts and Architecture, 75, no. 4, April 1958, pg. 8).
Not merely a departure from his earlier polychrome canvases, Rothko here dismantles their logic, regenerating an aesthetic theory of abstract modernism at the same time as the foundations of this school seemed most at threat. Just as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square utilizes the color black to proclaim the birth of modernist painting, Rothko returns to black in order to regenerate the movement, allowing his austere pigments to resonate across a full range of sensual possibilities. Untitled reverberates with the theory of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who writes how the ideal of blackness was necessary for art to “survive in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality” and that “blackness too—the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture’s facade—has a sensuous appeal” (Aesthetic Theory, London, 1997, pg. 59). Rothko employs his shades of black against the societal and aesthetic challenges erupting in the late 1960s, the work rejecting external participation in order to fully withdraw into itself. The work operates on a similar level as Frank Stella’s Black Paintings in their subversion of spatial illusion and rejection of referents, while Rothko’s masterful manipulation of his layers of black paint recall Ad Reinhardt’s skill in imbuing apparently monochrome canvases with barely perceptible geometric forms.
Rothko thus employs his restricted, opaque palette not as a delineation of his personal travails but as an invocation of the overwhelming grandeur which guided his idiosyncratic aesthetic theory. Untitled is in deep conversation with Rothko’s contemporaries, defending the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists through a revitalized rejuvenation of the artist’s style. The American director Stanley Kubrick employs a similar stylistic conceit in his contemporaneous film 2001: A Space Odyssey, employing Monoliths—black cuboids symbolizing the enigmatic and transcendent absolute, a negation countering human consciousness—as a significant plot driver. That Rothko and Kubrick both coincidentally employed the color black in order to raise humanistic queries in an antagonistic age demonstrates that Untitled is conversant with the milieu from which it emerged, its style and composition aligned more so with its times than with the artist’s internal turmoil. That The Rolling Stones’ rock anthem “Paint it Black” came out just two years prior intensifies the sense of Rothko’s canny parallelism with the wider avant-garde.
Untitled probes the spectator, exuding into their space and demanding their close scrutiny; only with close engagement does the work begin to reveal itself. A paean to abstract painting, Rothko here advances the conception of what paint could achieve while revitalizing and reimagining his own artistic vocabulary to stay abreast of social and artistic developments. While retaining the awesome aura associated with his practice, the present work propels Rothko’s signature painterly style into a new era in order to strike precisely at his uncompromising aesthetic theory.
Evoking a sober sensuality, Untitled’s two rectangular panes of dark pigment rest like veils over a ground of hazy subdued amber. Demanding a close and committed engagement, the work slowly reveals itself to the viewer, with the complexities of the surface slowly emerging whilst layers previously obscured come into being in an intricate play of painterly sprezzatura. Paradoxically, despite its palette, the work radiates with an internal light, animating the space of the speculator’s encounter. The velvety interaction between the black and amber fields establish a perceptual challenge enabling the artist’s articulated brushstrokes to dryly confront the viewer.
Rothko shifted his working practice from the large oil canvases typical of the 1950s toward working with smaller acrylic works on paper after suffering an aneurism in April 1968, the evolution in materials allowing him a greater dexterity in making variations; the planar nature of the paper surface similarly led Rothko to dramatically reevaluate the relationship between the artwork and the support. The artist allows his paint to thin and drip in some areas, notably at the top of the work, accentuating the disparity between paint fields and between paint and paper. The signature horizontal line of thick maroon pigment bisecting the work functions as a liminal interval between the work’s two dark zones, thrusting a transient stasis upon his visual field.
The dark palette typical of Rothko’s later works have sometimes been erroneously ascribed to the artist’s failing health and long bouts of depression; this analysis fails to fully consider how this extraordinary body of work marks a consciously radical point of departure for the artist in which he reevaluates his entire oeuvre, reinterpreting his earlier tableaux to challenge one last time the existentialist struggle against his own painterly praxis. Representing what he regarded as the ultimate realization of abstract painting, Rothko employs his blacks and swarthy pigments against the conception of legibility, resolutely rejecting the validity of symbolism in order to fully explore the opacity of vision itself. Rothko’s close confidant, the critic Dore Ashton, describes this palette as an “exasperation at the general misinterpretation of his earlier work—especially the effusive yellow, orange and pinks of three years back. He seems to be saying in these new foreboding works that he was never painting luxe, calme, and volupté, if we had only known it!” (“Art” in Arts and Architecture, 75, no. 4, April 1958, pg. 8).
Not merely a departure from his earlier polychrome canvases, Rothko here dismantles their logic, regenerating an aesthetic theory of abstract modernism at the same time as the foundations of this school seemed most at threat. Just as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square utilizes the color black to proclaim the birth of modernist painting, Rothko returns to black in order to regenerate the movement, allowing his austere pigments to resonate across a full range of sensual possibilities. Untitled reverberates with the theory of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who writes how the ideal of blackness was necessary for art to “survive in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality” and that “blackness too—the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture’s facade—has a sensuous appeal” (Aesthetic Theory, London, 1997, pg. 59). Rothko employs his shades of black against the societal and aesthetic challenges erupting in the late 1960s, the work rejecting external participation in order to fully withdraw into itself. The work operates on a similar level as Frank Stella’s Black Paintings in their subversion of spatial illusion and rejection of referents, while Rothko’s masterful manipulation of his layers of black paint recall Ad Reinhardt’s skill in imbuing apparently monochrome canvases with barely perceptible geometric forms.
Rothko thus employs his restricted, opaque palette not as a delineation of his personal travails but as an invocation of the overwhelming grandeur which guided his idiosyncratic aesthetic theory. Untitled is in deep conversation with Rothko’s contemporaries, defending the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists through a revitalized rejuvenation of the artist’s style. The American director Stanley Kubrick employs a similar stylistic conceit in his contemporaneous film 2001: A Space Odyssey, employing Monoliths—black cuboids symbolizing the enigmatic and transcendent absolute, a negation countering human consciousness—as a significant plot driver. That Rothko and Kubrick both coincidentally employed the color black in order to raise humanistic queries in an antagonistic age demonstrates that Untitled is conversant with the milieu from which it emerged, its style and composition aligned more so with its times than with the artist’s internal turmoil. That The Rolling Stones’ rock anthem “Paint it Black” came out just two years prior intensifies the sense of Rothko’s canny parallelism with the wider avant-garde.
Untitled probes the spectator, exuding into their space and demanding their close scrutiny; only with close engagement does the work begin to reveal itself. A paean to abstract painting, Rothko here advances the conception of what paint could achieve while revitalizing and reimagining his own artistic vocabulary to stay abreast of social and artistic developments. While retaining the awesome aura associated with his practice, the present work propels Rothko’s signature painterly style into a new era in order to strike precisely at his uncompromising aesthetic theory.