Mark Rothko

Betty Parsons Gallery, New York

Mr and Mrs Joseph Bransten, San Francisco (acquired from the above in 1950)

Mr John Bransten, San Francisco (by descent from the above in 1980)

Sale: Christie’s, New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 11 May 2005, Lot 26 (consigned by the estate of John Bransten)

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Betty Parsons Gallery, Mark Rothko, 1950

Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art, 37th Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Paintings, 1950, n.p., no. 68

San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, 20th Anniversary Exhibition: The Museum and its Collections – Collections of Modern Art in the Bay Area, 1955, n.p.

San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, Modern Masters in West Coast Collections: An Exhibtion Selected in Celebration of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1935-1960, 1960, n.p. 

Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Le Feu sous les cendres – De Picasso à Basquiat, 2005-06, p. 10, illustrated in colour 

Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Mark Rothko, 2007, p. 129, no. 16, illustrated in colour

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge: Von Rembrandt bis Picasso, 2007, p. 129, no. 16, illustrated in colour

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge: Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, p. 467, no. 225, illustrated in colour

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Mark Rothko, 2007-08, p. 132, no. 54, illustrated in colour and p. 212, installation view

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Mark Rothko: Retrospektive, 2008, p. 89, no. 54, illustrated in colour

Belle Krasne, ‘Mark of Rothko’, The Art Digest, No. 24, 15 January 1950, p. 17

Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Mark Rothko 1903-1970: A Retrospective, 1978-79, p. 280, installation view

Dore Ashton, About Rothko, New York 1983, p. 116, no. 23, installation view

David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas, Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London 1998, p. 319, no. 417, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Mark Rothko ‘A consummated experience between picture and onlooker', 2001, p. 24, installation view

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although there are stronger underlying lilac tonalities in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The top and bottom stretcher members have slightly bowed with age. Very close inspection reveals extremely light wear to the top left and bottom corners. There is a minute depression in the canvas towards the centre of the top edge.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Mark Rothko’s No. 10 of 1949 is an incandescent testament to the artist’s arrival at his inimitable and innovative union of colour and form that established his place within the canon of American Abstraction of the mid-Twentieth Century. Figuration, born of Symbolist and Surrealist influences, was a touchstone for Rothko in his early years, but he burned to create his own style – his personal declaration of the primal and inspirational role of art in the turbulent modernist world. Throughout the late 1940s, Rothko’s anthropomorphic images gradually dematerialise, becoming ever more ephemeral and weightless, appearing to float in a misty coalescence with the softly diffused ground. By 1949, Rothko achieved an integration of light and colour within his compositions, and the soft red, yellow, orange and green of the present work announce his triumphant success in merging shape with colour, in the absence of the painterly traditions of line, narrative and spatial perspective. The series of paintings to which No. 10 belongs were named Multiforms by Rothko and this title heralds the primacy of untethered hues and soft amorphous shapes in his aesthetic genius. When No. 10 was exhibited at the artist’s January 1950 show at the Betty Parson’s Gallery, Rothko had already begun painting the canvases that would be his first in the mature style known to us today as his classic masterpieces. In its reductive and expansive colour forms, No. 10 presages the grand canvases of the early 1950s.

Just five years earlier, Rothko began a period of growth and creativity with his first show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in January 1945, followed in 1946 by his inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and a one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Throughout the late 1940s, Rothko shared the friendship and aspirations of artists William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and most importantly, Clyfford Still, from whom he adopted the practice of using numbers for titles beginning with the Multiforms such as No. 10. The abandonment of realist titles was just one element of the rejection of sign as the central motif for painting, which Rothko shared with Still and Newman as the artists sought to purify their art by reducing the aesthetic elements to their most basic essence. As Rothko noted in his ‘Statement on His Attitude in Painting’ printed in 1949, “the progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea” (Mark Rothko, ‘Statement on His Attitude in Painting’, The Tiger’s Eye, No. 9, October 1949, p. 114).

Rothko first achieved the artistic fusion of colour and light with a series of watercolours created in the mid-1940s. In her essay for the artist’s 1978 retrospective, Diane Waldman addressed the affinity between these works on paper and the Multiforms when she noted that the  “luminosity, flatness, frontality and close-value colours ascribed to this period of Rothko’s great breakthrough in 1949-50 are already characteristic of these watercolours and pastels…” (Diane Waldman in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: a Retrospective, 1978, p. 48). In No. 10, Rothko seeps the oil pigment into the canvas threads as directly as watercolour binds with paper, and a number of complementary colours are harmoniously balanced within the composition, revealing “one of the supreme features of his genius – his ability to hold on a single plane colours that advance and retreat... Rothko had by now enlarged and neutralised his forms, allowing colour to breathe” (ibid., p. 57). The luscious, warm tones in No. 10 – particularly the red and yellow which are so potent in his later paintings – are almost contradictory to the visual dematerialisation of form and the delicacy of paint application achieved in the Multiforms, yet the jewel tones of No. 10 beautifully convey the synthesis Rothko brilliantly achieved in his pure, reductive and transcendent paintings.