Page 316 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
fronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.”21
Notwithstanding the existent variety of interpretations of Rothko’s work, this sacral understanding of his work and the relationship of that understanding to the aesthetics of Late Byzantine painting is the main topic in this chapter. It should here be noted that our choice to focus on Rothko’s works of the classic period was made after our system- atic examination and a subsequent observation of the following: From the early 1950s, having passed its so-called Transitional years (1946 to 1949), Rothko’s style of painting became strikingly comparable to the particular aesthetic notions characteristic of Late Byzantine painting, in particular, to the notion of the exalted and to that of the harmoly- pi – simultaneous joy and sorrow.22
A Buddhist thinker, Nagapriya Wright in his short text entitled Rothko and Byzantine Art, states the following: “Rothko’s paintings have a sacral quality that leads to a sense of awe and humility, a sense of heightened awareness and clarity of emotion and pur- pose. For these reasons, Rothko’s work for me has an iconic quality, opening up a series of portals on to the transcendent, which ultimately reveals the depths of our own imag- inative potential.”23
Nagapriya Wright’s above mentioned text constitutes the closest and, in our view, the so far most insightful connection made between Rothko’s classic paintings and the aes- thetics of Byzantine art. Further, although the theological dimension of Rothko’s classic paintings has been sporadically discussed in the past,24 to the best of our knowledge, our
21 This statement by Rothko is cited by Jacob Baal-Teshuva. See: Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Rothko (Taschen, 2003), 50–57.
22 In the tradition of Byzantine chanting the term ‘harmolypi’ (χαρμολύπη) is used to describe the tone which is simultaneously joyful and sorrowful. The same term can also be used in regards to Byzantine iconography, in cases where notions of joy and sorrow are deliberately combined.
23 Nagapriya Wright, “Rothko and Byzantine Art,” initially accessed in 2011, last accessed 17 August 2022: http://sub- flaneur.tumblr.com/post/19392575266/rothko-and-byzantine-art
24 One example is a text written by David E. Anderson where he states:
“The poet Stanley Kunitz once told artist Mark Rothko he was ‘the last rabbi in Western art.’
Critic Robert Hughes described Rothko as belonging to the ‘theological’ wing of the New York School of abstract
artists in mid-twentieth-century America, while the headline of a New York Times review by Hilton Kramer of a major Rothko retrospective in 1978 read ‘Rothko: Art as Religious Faith.’
As curator and editor Glenn Phillips notes in Seeing Rothko, a collection of essays on the artist and the act of seeing ‘Rothko’s work has variously been described as transcendental, tragic, mystical, violent, or serene; as representative of the void; as opening onto the experience of the sublime; as exhilaratingly intellectual; or as profoundly spiritual—to mention just a few examples.’
At the very least, Rothko and his paintings beg to be seen to some degree in religious or spiritual terms. This isn’t always easy for many viewers, especially with his signature paintings of stacked rectangles and pure abstractions that,
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