Mark Rothko

Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York
The Lionel Corporation, New York
PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

 "Rothko succumbed to the lure of light, light that, as the Byzantine inscriptionists said, can be contained but never captured really; light that envelops us and is all things that we are not. In moving toward this ineffable beacon it was natural enough that Rothko should find his way to the light of paper, that most subtle of light reflecting bearers, and that his work on paper should be as integral a part of his total vision as his easel paintings and murals. (Dore Ashton in Exhibition Catalogue, Washington D.C., National Museum of Art, Mark Rothko Works on Paper, 1984, p. 9.)

Dating from the late 1969s, Mark Rothko's dynamic Untitled (Red and Orange on Salmon) is a sublime example of the artist's prized works on paper, witnessing the poignant conclusion of his investigations into form, surface, composition and above all, colour. Having laboriously worked towards an abstract vocabulary capable of expressing the existential crisis of man throughout the 1960s, it is only in the emotive works of his final years that he was able to paint as if "seeing the world for the first time." The present work is a shining light in the predominantly sombre palette that characterised his later work. Two horizontal, feathery-edged rectangular fields of unadulterated disembodied colour, seemingly float or hover one on top of the other against a thinly brushed ground of deep salmon. This is colour transformed into pure emotion: the vibrancy of hue strikes a deep sonic chord in the heart of the viewer, resonating like the toll of an emotive bell. Rothko stated: "I am not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else... I am only interested in expressing the basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on - and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted by my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." (The artist in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957, pp. 93-4)

Although never touching, the juxtaposed planes of colour seem to flow into one another creating an effect close to that of light pouring in through a stained glass window. This puissant combination of salmon red and vibrant cadmium scarlet, each delicately applied in a rich veil of sensual pigment, demonstrates the crux of the artist's investigation into form, surface, composition and above all, colour. Striving to find and abstract language capable of expressing man's existential crisis, Rothko's mature work can be seen as a programmatic investigation into the ability of colour to probe the profound depths of human feeling. Paradoxically, by restricting his formal means, Rothko found great freedom, combining an enormous range of colours in ever-changing combinations to explore the endless permutations of the human psyche.

Untitled (Red and Orange on Salmon) is one of his most emotive paper works from this period and an apt demonstration of the importance of the medium in his broader oeuvre. With his canvases, Rothko minimised the tactility of his painted surface by developing a dyeing technique in which the pigment seeped into the canvas. In the paperworks, by contrast, the quality of the support allowed for a different range of surface texture and colour density. In the present work, the thinly applied salmon background still bears evidence of the artist's vertical brushstroke, while the thick oil within the rectangular clouds is interspersed with delicate ridges of minute impasto and nuanced colour ranges. Although Rothko restricts spatial illusionism, the result here is to give a sense of shallow depth, a paradoxical fluctuation in space in which the ethereal blocks of colour not only seem to hover on the surface but actually move forward, inhabiting the space between the viewer and the picture plane.

Light is an essential component in Rothko's desire to communicate an exalted emotional experience and he found the paper background allowed for an inner luminosity that emanated from the very core of the work. Rothko's mastery of light and the resultant success of his paintings owe in a large part to his study of his forebears, among them Turner, Whistler, and in particular the quattrocento frescos of Fra Angelico which he admired on trips to Italy. In his revolutionary mode of painting, unlike anything that art history had seen before, he sought to find a present day analogue to the revered masterpieces of the High Renaissance which were intended to inspire their beholder not merely with their formal perfection but also as reminders of an order beyond man and nature. At the same time, Rothko's deification of colour owed much to Matisse's radical use of unifying planes of sensuous colour which flatten space into a two-dimensional surface. Like Matisse, Rothko's work responds to the Symbolist idea that there is a transcendent correspondence between colour, sensation, sound and memory. It materialises a pure language beyond the imagery and objecthood of reality through a vocabulary of colour that speaks directly to the inner being of the viewer. Rothko's aspiration was to recreate the grandeur and pathos of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, to engage his viewer in a cathartic exchange with light, colour and form as his dramatis personae: "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers." (the artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate, Mark Rothko, 1987, p. 83)

A stunning example of Rothko's vision, Untitled (Red and Orange on Salmon) inhabits a world of emotion and feeling beyond the realm of the quotidian. Invoking a sense of the sublime, it is not a picture of an experience but rather it constitutes an experience in itself. Bordering on the mystic, the powerful simplicity of the work demonstrates the majestic purity of Rothko's new language of colour.