Lot 45
  • 45

Mark Rothko

Estimate
2,200,000 - 2,800,000 GBP
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Description

  • Mark Rothko
  • Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue)
  • acrylic on paper mounted on canvas
  • 85.4 by 65.3cm.
  • 33 3/4 by 25 3/4 in.
  • Executed in 1966.

Provenance

Private Collection, New York
Spark Inc., Tokyo
Private Collection, Toyko
Private Collection, New York

Exhibited

Kawamura, Memorial Museum of Art; Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma, Museum of Contemporary Art; Nagoya, City Art Museum; Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Mark Rothko, 1995-96, pp. 152-153, no. 45, illustrated in colour

Catalogue Note

"Either their surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say" Mark Rothko in 1953

 

Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue) of 1966 is a rare and outstanding painting by Mark Rothko, believed to be one of only four recorded works on paper from this year. The date signifies the inception of the artist's obsession with this medium in the later 1960s. This work stands at the beginning of that extraordinary project which occupied him until his death in 1970: the pioneering exploration of the absolute limits of painting on paper. Biographically, it is rooted in a highly portentous time in the artist's life, replete with the onset of despair, which was reflected in Rothko's palette shifting towards ominous darker tones. By contrast, Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue) emerges as an incandescent ray of light in these dark years and encapsulates Rothko's revolution in Abstraction in the most perfectly serene terms. This painting is testament that although Rothko's troubled mindset was beset by depression, it also harboured the inspiration for a painted chink of optimism, expressed as the consummate colour field multiform.

 

Sixteen of the seventeen works on canvas that Rothko produced in 1966 were for the De Menil Chapel in Houston. This was the salient commission of Rothko's career, which he himself described as his single most important artistic statement. It precipitated a period of unprecedented focus during the epic career of the twentieth century master, culminating in the chapel's eventual unveiling after his death in 1971. He even recreated the atmospheric light of the chapel in his studio on Manhattan's East 69th Street with a system of blinds and pulleys, having been completely consumed by generating the sombre monumentality of this project. The work he produced during this time, and particularly in the central year of 1966, was necessarily affected by the tremendous inspiration of the chapel. As Rothko was constructing this massive testimony - in many ways his own, monolithic memento mori - he also produced its perfect compliment, Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue). The present work emanates endemic luminosity through the paper's capacity both to absorb and to reflect, and is infused with energised tranquillity. Its intimate character and perfect formation counterbalance the publicly spiritual experience of the chapel. As an exceptionally rare object, this painting provides real insight into the psychological mechanics of this seminal Abstract Expressionist.   

 

Rothko was also fixated with the literary work of Friedrich Nietzsche, above all the German philosopher's seminal opus The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music written in 1872, which impacted Rothko's colour field iconography. This major treatise intently examines the nature of culture from the perspective of Greek mythology. Nietzsche dissects cultural difference according to the schism between Apollo, god of the sun and lightness, and Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. These two divergent sons of Zeus represent a metaphysical dichotomy in value systems. Apollonian characteristics include clarity, critical reason, self-control, perfection, and individuality; whereas Dionysian traits comprise intoxication, passion, dissolution of boundaries, and wholeness. Although the ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods as opposites, Nietzsche saw the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as the kernel prerequisite for the creation of tragedy in art. These antithetical, diametrically opposed forces find their counterpart in Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue) by the two blocks of colour, which are energised through their juxtaposition.

 

Here, two shivering zones, near-identical in shape and size, are simultaneously drawn together and held apart by a bar of intense electric blue. This blue strip is confrontationally opaque, contrasting effectively with the richly saturated fields above and below. Consequently, the work operates around an identifiable focus that inevitably draws the viewer to the central horizontal axis. Simultaneously, the two larger colour fields equilibrate: the lure of one is immediately countered by the irresistible pull of the other. Thus caesura both induces focus and demarcates a perennial balance-counterbalance relationship between above and below. The work's resultant dynamism necessitates the viewer's constant attention.  

 

In 1966 The Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited Turner: Imagination and Reality, which included ninety-nine works focusing on the last twenty years of the English artist's career. Rothko visited this show in the same year as he painted Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue), and presumably felt eerily empathetic with exhibited works such as Turner's The Pink Sky (after 1820, The British Museum, London). In the catalogue, Lawrence Gowing sums up Turner's mastery:

 

"no one else before developed so far and with such devotion this special order of painting, which is so hard to define and yet so recognisable. It is hard to define because the fantasy and the image are implicit in the material it is made of, inseparable from the actual behaviour of paint in the painter's hands. Turner showed that a certain potentiality was inherent in the nature of painting. The latent possibility has emerged again. Turner's vision and his towering fantasy remain his own, beyond compare. Nevertheless we meet him with a sense of recognition" (Lawrence Gowing in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Turner: Imagination and Reality, 1966, p. 56).

 

When he read Lawrence Gowing's words Rothko must have been overwhelmed by the affinity with his own work. Obviously there is a parallel between his 1968 bequest of the Seagram murals to the Tate Gallery in London, and Turner's own monumental bequest to the Tate at his death. Both artists stipulated that their bequeathed works must not be split up but always displayed collectively, and Rothko was very keen for his colour-fields to be housed near to Turner's works. Therefore it becomes clear that in addition to embodying aspects of Rothko's psychology and pioneering philosophical import, Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue) is also central to the art historical canon and a descendent of the transcendent luminosity of Turner.

 

Rothko once wrote, "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space" (Mark Rothko, 'The Romantics Were Prompted', 1947, Clifford Ross, Ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York 1990, p. 167).

 

Creating drama out of the interaction between different tensions (Apollonian and Dionysian) is central to Rothko's abstraction. However, this painting should not be thought of in terms of personified human tragedy: there is no figurative or literal metaphor here. Rothko's abhorrence of formal analysis of his work was demonstrated when he rebuked William Seitz's itemised criticism by saying "I want pure response in terms of human need" (in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Mark Rothko, 1999, p. 303). Untitled (Blue Divided by Blue) surpasses universal interpretation. Rather, it proves the final manifestation of Bonnie Clearwater's assertion that Rothko's "works on paper chart the artist's quest for an elemental language that would communicate basic human emotions and move all mankind" (Bonnie Clearwater in Exhibition Catalogue, Mark Rothko. Works on Paper, New York 1984, p. 17).