Page 304 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
contrary, they point to the aesthetic breadth as well as creative depth of Rothko’s artistic experience. That said, the purpose of this chapter is to examine and interpret primarily those aspects of Rothko’s work that may be regarded as aspects of the Late Byzantine experience.
More specifically, in this chapter we shall attempt to demonstrate the existence of significant inspirations from Late Byzantine painting in the classic works of Mark Roth- ko. To this cause we shall be assisted by a number of visual demonstrations and para- digms. The three main questions that we shall be addressing in this chapter are: What are the particularities of the notion of the divine in Rothko’s work? What is the likely provenance of the otherworldly light in Rothko’s colour? Why should we understand the aesthetics of Late Byzantine painting as Rothko’s unassuming yet profoundly reveal- ing legacy to posterity?
The present chapter is divided into following nine segments: (1) From Migration to Clairvoyance, (2) Rothko the Mystic, (3) On the Sacral Dimension of Rothko’s Work, (4) On the Influence of Nietzsche, (5) A Late Byzantine and Theological Hypothesis, (6) On the Hybrid-Byzantine Light in Rothko’s Colour, (7) Introduction to Visual Demonstra- tions, (8) Visual Demonstrations, and (9) The Late Byzantine Rothko.
From Migration to Clairvoyance
Mark Rothko, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, was born as Marcus Rothkowitz4 in 1903, in Dvinsk, Russia (today Daugavpils, part of Latvia), as a fourth child of a phar- macist and intellectual Jacob Rothkowitz and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz. Like other Jew- ish families at that time, being intimidated by the Russian Czarist regime, the Rothkow- itz family decided to leave Dvinsk. Therefore, in 1910, in order to create conditions for the settling of the rest of the family, Rothko’s father was the first to arrive in the United States, and in 1913 the whole family was finally reunited. Marcus Rothkowitz arrived in the United States on the 17th of August with his two sisters, Anna and Sonia. Many years later, in 1940, the artist shortened his name to Mark Rothko, but by that time many oth- er things had also changed in his life.
In particular, by the year of 1940, Rothko was beyond the so called realist years of his artistic development, which formally began in January 1924 when he enrolled in George
4 In relevant literature, Rothko’s original surname is also spelled: Rothkovich.
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