The present work brilliantly showcases Rothko at a breakthrough moment in his career, just prior to the moment where he would transition fully from figuration to his iconic canvases of pure color. This Surrealist painting underscores the critical transformation Rothko underwent in the 1940s and evokes the very best of his earlier paintings. Mark Rothko is among the pantheon of artists whose ability to evoke universal truths through painting has fundamentally shifted our visual culture. Executed in 1945, Untitled marks the genesis of Rothko's restless search for a unique point of view.

Rothko, who had immigrated to the United States with his family from the Russian Empire in 1913, attended Yale for two years before leaving in 1923 to enroll in the Art Students League. While there, Rothko was influenced by notable faculty such as Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan who had made the venerable institution a "stronghold of realist tradition during the 1920s and 1930s” (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mark Rothko in New York, 1994, p. 13). Rothko spent much of that time employing a New York-specific Social Realist style, painting everyday people on the subway, in restaurants and at the beach. Influenced by his forebears in Modernism, particularly Max Weber, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne, Rothko’s larger goal became capturing the essential character of his subjects, thus abandoning depictions which could be linked to a specific time and place.

Furthering his trajectory towards abstraction, Untitled incorporates many of the artistic gestures and themes that Rothko would explore for the rest of his career. Throughout the 1940s, the New York creative community was indelibly influenced by an exodus of Surrealist artists fleeing the horrors of Europe, among them André Breton, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. The present work is a paragon of Rothko’s concept of “Plasticity,” defined by the “sensation of movement both into the canvas and out from the space anterior to the surface of the canvas.” In Rothko’s mind, “Plasticity” can be initiated in art when “the artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of his canvas. The spectator must move with the artist’s shapes in and out, under and above, diagonally and horizontally; he must curve around spheres, pass through tunnels, glide down inclines, at times perform an aerial feat of flying from point to point, attracted by some irresistible magnet across space” (Christopher Rothko, Ed., Mark Rothko: The Artist’s Reality, Philosophies of Art, New Haven 2004, p. 47).

Untitled inspires this sensation of unbound movement—bringing together organic shapes and hard-edged forms in a symphony of dissonant and Surrealist-inspired elements of the composition. The present work grants access to Rothko’s thought process in which forms are delineated in washes of tone. Importantly, the present work presages Rothko’s celebrated use of unexpected and affecting color relationships; passages of warm wood tones, dusk gray, burnt sienna, and undertones of illuminating highlights give life to the composition and shed light on Rothko's works to come.

Artist

Mark Rothko