Mark Rothko

In the paintings of 1946-1948, among which Untitled (1948) is a superlative example, one can witness the birth of Rothko’s mature style culminating in paintings referred to as Multiforms of 1948-1950, including the present work.

Rothko’s first exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century in January 1945 centered around his more figurative works of classical, mythic, organic and biomorphic images and the introduction to the catalogue acknowledges the artist was in a formative phase in which he synthesized many critical influences. ``Rothko’s painting is not easily classified. It occupies a middle ground between abstraction and surrealism. In these paintings the abstract idea is incarnated in the image. …Rothko‘s symbols, fragments of myth, are held together by a free, almost automatic calligraphy that gives a peculiar unity to his paintings – a unity in which the individual symbol acquires its meaning, not in isolation, but rather in its melodic adjustment to the other elements in the picture.’’ (Exh. Cat., New York, Art of This Century, Mark Rothko: Paintings, 1945, n.p.). Although the image or Sign is still present in Rothko’s work, the nascent tendency to harmonize the ``symbol’’ into an overall unity is the key to his eventual triumph in creating his masterpieces of color, light and form of the 1950s and 1960s.

From 1946 to 1948, Rothko’s images undergo a gradual dematerialization, becoming ever more ephemeral and gaining in weightlessness, appearing to float into and coalesce within a softly diffuse ground. Increasingly, Rothko sought to integrate light within the composition, and the watercolors and gouaches of this period were a fruitful means to explore increased luminosity in his oeuvre. In this smaller scale, Rothko also limited his palette to earth colors and neutral grays. As Diane Waldman has noted, ``The luminosity, flatness, frontality and close-value colors ascribed to this period of Rothko’s great breakthrough in 1949-50 are already characteristic of these watercolors and pastels of the mid-1940s. Many of them are among his most beautiful works.’’ (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: a Retrospective, 1978, p. 48)

The canvases of 1946 retained more of the calligraphic images than the paintings of 1947-1948 in which Rothko began to fully formulate his mature style, concurrently with his fellow New York artists who forged their own highly individualistic styles of abstraction during this time of ferment and discovery. Surrealism was totally eliminated and line was abandoned as Rothko’s paintings became a forum only for color, light, and space. In paintings such as Untitled (1948), color-shapes emerge as Rothko’s central motif for the first-time. The present work retains the earth colors of many of the gouaches with its sienna brown and warm red, but Rothko’s gift of composition through color values and harmonies was evident in the organizational role of the bright blue, white, red and yellow. Horizontal and vertical forms of vaguely rectangular or ovoid shape still hint at a landscape and horizon, but the impression is generalized and almost subliminal. The thin veils of color share an affinity with the misty layers of watercolor, thus granting the present composition the same sense of light and airy space that the paper works convey. The gentle curves and sloping contours of Untitled predict the simplification of form that appears in the Multiform paintings of 1949-1950 in which Rothko’s quest for clarification and unification is a step closer to his mature style. The shapes become more rectangular and color emerges triumphant as the sole formal elements in Rothko’s compositions. In this reduction of means and purging of Modern influences, Rothko did not limit his overall achievement. Instead, the artist ironically liberated his aesthetic into a more expressive and sublime realm. The viewer is free to intuit a wide range of interpretations and responses to Rothko’s formal reductivism.