Page 322 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
clude appeals to anything but the literal; but in both cases the distinction between the firsthand and the secondhand tends to get blurred. When something becomes everything it also becomes less real, and what the latest abstract painting seems to harp on is the questionability of the material and the corporeal. A radically transcendental and a radi- cally positivist exclusiveness both arrive at anti-illusionist, or rather counter-illusionist, art. Once again, extremes meet.”38
Upon its publication, Greenberg’s view that the experience of the transcendent in Byz- antine art is detectably related to the experience of the literal in modern art, was regard- ed as revealing. In more recent years, other scholars have also linked Rothko’s work to medieval and early Christian art. For example, John Gage points out that it is likely that Rothko was influenced by the 8th century manuscripts which contain the commentary by the Spanish priest Beatus.39 More particularly, Gage observes that it is likely that Rothko was among the New York painters who looked at the Beatus manuscripts40 with particu- lar interest, and that he adapted “their stacked coloured bares (see image 11) as a back- ground for his own figurations in his surrealist works and their highly saturated palette of reds and yellows, greens and purples, for his mature style.”41 Additionally, in one of the footnotes of the same essay, Gage points out that: “There is an even more Rothko-like treatment of banded color, this time with soft contours, in the image of Chaos in a twelfth-century Byzantine Octateuch in the Vatican Library (Vat. Gr. 746 fol. 19v).”42
Also, there is a possibility that Rothko, in spite of the fact that he migrated from Rus- sia to United States when he was barely ten, kept a vivid memory of the exuberant col- ours of Russian (Byzantine-style) icons, as well as of their geometric simplicity, and that, combined with his subsequent influences, over the decades of his maturing, this memory gradually surfaced in his painting and reached its climax in the works of his classic pe- riod.
Another, somewhat more probable hypothesis would be that, due to the contact with Medieval art, which he certainly had during his travels to Europe, Rothko became par- ticularly inspired by its non-naturalistic forms, its non-naturalistic colour-palettes, its liking of the geometrical arrangement, and its overall tendency towards abstraction. Of course, the reality might have it that it was Rothko’s childhood memories of icons from
38 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (Beacon Press, 1961), 169–170.
39 John Gage, “Rothko: Color as Subject,” in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington: National Gallery of Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 259–260.
40 Two of the surviving Beatus manuscripts are in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
41 John Gage, “Rothko: Color as Subject,” in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington: National Gallery of Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 260.
42 Ibid, 261.
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