Page 305 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter VI
Bridgman’s life drawing class at the Art Students League (ASL) in New York.5 Previously to this, he had studied at Yale University, but in 1923 he left Yale without graduating and without having taken any art classes. From October 1925 until May 1926 at ASL Rothko studied still-life under Max Weber, under whose recommendation he worked in the manner of Cézanne at the time.
These years of both artistic and intellectual enquiry gradually transfigured Rothko into a spiritual erudite, rather than merely a painter. In his mature years he became widely read, and, approximately within the period between 1936 and 1941, he was himself writing a book concerning art. The writings which comprise this truly engaging book were lost for a time, and then rediscovered after Rothko’s death in the mid 1980s and were subsequently edited by Rothko’s son, Christopher Rothko, who also wrote an in- troduction for the publication.6 Like Kandinsky, when Rothko spoke of his work he re- ferred much more to content than form.7 In Rothko’s 45-year long artistic career we distinguish four periods: the Realist period (from 1924 to 1940), the Surrealist period (from 1940 to 1946), the Transitional period (from 1946 to 1949), and the Classic period (from 1949 to 1970).
In the first two periods he painted landscapes, interiors, still-life, the scenes from the New York subway, as well as other city-related themes. The subway paintings reflect the loneliness of an outsider-migrant and a depressive estrangement within modern urban life (image 3). In his Surrealist phase, coinciding with the unsettling atmosphere of the Second World War, Rothko’s painting became symbolic, as he found inspiration in Greek Mythology, primitive art, and Christian tragedy (see images 4 and 5).
Prior to this, for five years, between 1935 and 1940, Rothko was showing his work with a group of independent artists called The Ten8 – of which he was a cofounder. Rothko’s
5 We note that our reference to Rothko’s biography is necessarily shortened in this chapter. Thus, for example in our discussion of this particular period we do not refer to the fact that in 1924, having returned from New York to Port- land for a brief period, Rothko studied acting in a theater company run by Josephine Dillon: it is noted in his biography that later in life Rothko liked to recount how Clark Gable was his understudy there. This detail, as well as other valuable information about Rothko’s life are recorded by Rothko’s biographer James Breslin (1993), as well as by other scholars, such as Jessica Stewart in: Jeffrey Weiss, et al. Mark Rothko (Washington: National Gallery of Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 334.
6 Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited by Christopher Rothko (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
7 This can be understood from Rothko’s various statements and writings, which shall be discussed in this chapter.
8 Members of this group shared “a distaste for conservatism and a desire for experimentation;” they were: Marcus Rothkowitz, Ben Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Jack Kufeld, Louis Schanker, Joseph Solomon, Nahum Tschac- basov and Ilya Bolotowsky. As they were only nine, in their exhibitions, members of this group filled the tenth place with a guest artist and thus came to be known as “The Ten Who Are Nine.” The group was dissolved in 1940. See Roth- ko’s Biography compiled by Jessica Stewart and included in: Jeffrey Weiss, et al. Mark Rothko (Washington: National Gallery of Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 337.
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