Page 340 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
29. Mark Rothko, Five Studies for the Harvard Murals, c.1958–1960, tempera on coloured construction paper, various sizes, private collection.
Considerable insight into Rothko’s inspiration by Russian and Byzantine iconography is also provided by his icon-like studies for Harvard Murals (c.1958–1960), shown in im- age 29. These studies were not painted with oil-colours, but like the Byzantine icons, they were most likely painted with egg tempera. Although it is uncertain whether these particular studies were actually painted with egg tempera or simply with tempera, it can be anticipated that, just like in his many other works, Rothko adhered to the former. And what is more interesting is that these are painted on already coloured, construction pa- per – which can easily be compared to the backgrounds of Late Byzantine compositions presented without figures in our visual demonstrations.
Of course, it is not only Rothko’s bright-colour compositions that remind of Byzantine and Russian icons. On the next page, above left is another Russian icon from which we have eventually extracted the figural features (image below left), whereas above right is Rothko’s work entitled Black on Deep Purple. In spite of the obvious chromatic difference and in spite of the fact that in this particular example of a Russian icon – unlike in some of the icons that we shall see later – there is no Rothko-like softness of the brushwork, the similarity of the overall mood created by the absolute treatment of colour is distinct. In the bottom right image of this page we have made an experiment by including the figural features of the late 16th century Russian icon within Rothko’s classic composition: this image could be mistaken for a traditional icon in Russia of the 16th century.
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