Картина Марка Ротко "Без названия"

Mark Rothko's works on paper served as important laboratories for his experiments with colour from the mid-1940s until the end of his life. Dedicated to a life-long search for luminosity in painting, he sought to express the ineffable conditions of the soul through his subtle orchestrations of pure fields of colour. In the late 1960s, Mark Rothko turned to the medium of acrylic on paper, and in experimenting with this newly popularized form of synthetic paint he soon found that the directness of this medium successfully expressed the chromatic intonations that he was searching for.

The present work, dating from 1967, is an excellent example of Rothko's explorations with working with brilliant tones upon the smooth surface of paper. At the same time that he was working on the dark and brooding canvases that dominated the last few years of his life, he also worked on numerous compositions on paper using very vivid colours - perhaps finding a welcome respite in such brightly hued works. The works on paper that date from his final years are frequently cited as being the most powerful examples in this medium of his career. In creating works on paper over the course of three decades, he used the medium both as a preparatory stage in developing compositions on canvases, but also as fully conceived paintings in their own right. To this end, he chose to have most of his fully realized works on paper mounted onto three-dimensional supports. He appears to have welcomed the fact that the colours would experience fewer changes over time when they were painted on paper rather than on canvas. In addition, the dry surface of acrylic paint on paper allowed for the untainted expression of matte colour without the sheen of oil pigments. In some cases, he reworked earlier oil on canvas compositions in acrylic on paper, refining them to reach the essence of colour and radiance for which he was searching; in other cases, he seems to have striven to create subtle variations on his past successes.

Rothko had struck upon his classic compositional format in 1949, which consisted of two or three rounded rectangular forms floating upon a field of colour that bleeds to the edge. This extremely pared-down format allowed the chromatic fields to carry the full weight of expression, and Rothko was able to articulate an astonishing range of visceral emotional states through his sensitive arrangements of colour. The present work conveys a buoyant, energetic mood in its harmonies of warm tones layered upon one another. By layering these veils of paint, Rothko imparted a sense of depth to his compositions, and captured a sense of duration and revelation within his purely abstract visual language. Here, the lighter ground of terra-cotta pigment seems to have an irrepressible luminosity that glows through the rectangular fields of red and mustard paint. There is a beautiful rhythm visible in the hazy veils of scarlet and mustard paint, where Rothko's wide brush has caressed the surface in an undulating pattern. The composition also conveys a sense of defying gravity in the way that the upper red rectangle seems to float despite its visual weight. Rothko's expressive brushstrokes greatly enliven the edges of the coloured fields, and the way that they flicker upward also seems to defy any gravitational pull, almost like flames rising.

The floating geometric forms arranged on the picture plane were considered by Rothko to be actual objects and not abstract. He believed that everything had its own reality: 'My new area of colour are things, I put them on the surface. They do not run to the edge, they stop before the edge... Abstract art never interested me; I have always painted realistically. My present paintings are realistic. When I thought symbols were the best means of conveying my meaning I used them. When I felt figures were, I used them' (Rothko quoted in Mark Rothko, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, 1987, p.73).

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