Untitled

No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment.

Untitled is a 40-inch high acrylic painting on paper laid down on canvas that Rothko executed in 1968. After many years of exhausting work preparing for and then executing the mural paintings for the Menil Chapel in Houston, Rothko for a short time found difficulty in returning to a more ordinary day-to-day painting routine. This difficulty prompted a radical change in the way Rothko worked and he began to experiment once again with the medium of acrylic on paper. The move into acrylics reawakened Rothko's ambition but in the spring of 1968, Rothko suffered a severe aneurysm that left him in a precarious physical shape. Under strict orders from his doctor Rothko was forbidden from working with the more strenuous medium of oil paint and from working on paintings over 40ins in height.

As a result of these limitations all of the paintings Rothko produced in the last two years of his life - save his very last duotone grey paintings - are acrylic works of varying sizes but none higher than forty inches. Contrary to popular belief, and as Untitled clearly illustrates, Rothko's late paintings are not all dark works that grow ever more black until the artist's suicide in 1970, but are often brightly coloured and even reflective of his most vibrant work of the 1950s. This is not to say that these late paintings are light in mood however. As Rothko - perhaps unaware of the symbolism in his statement- repeatedly pointed out to Dore Ashton at this time, "the dark is always at the top" and as Ashton herself has taken pains to reiterate, these late paintings are a direct product of the artist's "sinking heart".

Ashton also sees these paintings as being "consequent to the murals" for indeed Rothko's late acrylic paintings were in many ways a re-exploration in a different medium of the profound depths of feeling that Rothko had immersed himself in when creating the Houston Chapel paintings. There, his central theme had been the Passion of Christ, the finality of death and the reality of the human spirit. Working over the summer of 1968 after his own recent brush with death and with its constant threat still hanging over him, this heavy drinking, heavy smoking, hypochondriac painter who throughout his life had sought an art of transcendence, dedicated himself to his work like never before. Increasingly he came to seek both solace and meaning from his art, and attempted in these late works to emulate the great tragedies of his literary heroes Aeshyllus and Shakespeare. "Breathing" the paint - as he liked to say - onto the surface in a series of thick brush strokes Rothko attempted to directly provoke an emotional response from the viewer through the intensity of his colour and the effervescent nature of its surface. These late paintings aim to stimulate a sense of transcendent grandeur by drawing out the chthonic dionysian forces of primal nature and confining them within the picture plane in such a way that each work conjures a sense of monumental emotion compressed into a small and unremarkable human scale.

Working on several paintings at one time by taping each work against a large plywood backboard that served as an easel, the intensity of these acrylics often clearly reflects the tragic conditions of the artist's life at this time. As his biographer James Breslin has pointed out, since the spring of 1968 Rothko had experienced a series of losses. He had separated from his wife and children, left his home to live in his studio and his recent aneurysm had robbed him of his sexual potency, and prompted his doctors to insist he stick to strict diet and abstain from drinking and smoking. Rothko largely ignored the doctor's advice concerning alcohol and cigarettes and as his friend Stanley Kunitz recalled, began to move "out of the world in general. He became solely self-preoccupied. That was one of the after effects of the aneurysm, and I think he was rejecting family, Mell (his wife) and the children and everything except art." (cited in Mark Rothko ; A Biograph James E. B. Breslin, Chicago 1993, p. 505.)

With its warm radiant colours somewhat redolent of the Passion and of sacrifice Untitled seems an intensely personal and human work in both its scale and its colour. These elements are echoed through the gravitas of the swift brushstrokes that make up the painting's subtly mottled surface and in the profound sense of tonal discord that is established by the shimmering proximity of the two contrasting coloured rectangles. Seeming to express an inexplicable but profound human truth a painting like Untitled illustrates the emotive power of pure colour to articulate an inner human language . It is a work that responds to the demand that Rothko asserted in 1948 when he wrote that "Pictures must be miraculous … a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need." (Mark Rothko: The Romantics were Prompted.. )