Page 321 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter VI
A Late Byzantine and Theological Hypothesis
In 1964 Rothko was commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil to do a series of large paintings, intended for a yet to be built chapel at St Thomas Catholic University in Houston. Rothko told his friends that this project was to become his most important artistic statement. Also, wishing them a happy new year in 1966, he is cited to have writ- ten to the de Menils as follows:
“The magnitude on every level of experience and meaning of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions, and it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me. For this I thank you.”36
Rothko’s artistic achievement indeed culminates in the paintings exhibited inside The Rothko Chapel in Houston, and we shall later elaborate on their specific relationship to the aesthetics of Late Byzantine painting. However, before our comparative analyses commence, we should emphasise that there is a plethora of meaning in Rothko’s works of the classic period, and the observed Late Byzantine aspects in this chapter should be understood as one important facet of a highly multifaceted artistic achievement.
The first significant scholarly mention of the relationship of Rothko’s work to Byzan- tine aesthetics was made by Clement Greenberg in his essay entitled Byzantine Parallels, which was written in 1958 and included in Greenberg’s Art and Culture: Critical Essays – published in 1961.37 At the end of the Byzantine Parallels, which since its publication made history in Modern art criticism, Greenberg points out the fact that both in Byzan- tine and in modernist art, the distinction between the literal and the transcendent tends to get blurred:
“The Byzantines dematerialised firsthand reality by invoking a transcendent one. We seem to be doing something similar in our science as well as art, insofar as we invoke the material against itself by insisting on its all-encompassing reality. The Byzantines ex- cluded appeals to literal experience against the transcendent, whereas we seem to ex-
36 Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Rothko (Taschen, 2003), 73.
37 In this essay Greenberg states: “Neither Byzantine nor modernist art has rested with the mere dismantling of sculptural illusion. Byzantine painting and mosaic moved from the beginning toward a vision of full color in which the role of white-and-dark contrast was radically diminished. In Gauguin and in Late Impressionism, something similar had already begun to happen, and now, after Cubism, American painters like Newman, Rothko and Still seem almost to polemicize against value contrasts. They attempt to expel every reminiscence of sculptural illusion by creating a count- er-illusion of light alone – a counterillusion which consists in the projection of an indeterminate surface of warm and luminous color in front of the actual painted surface.” Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (Beacon Press, 1961), 169.
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