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The Case For Mark Rothko 中文翻译：贝蒂 译文校对：卢克与龙 翻译仅供参考 | 视频不得商用

英文稿：

You see a painting of a hazy rectangle

of color stacked on top of another hazy rectangle of color.

And you think to yourself, oh right, a Rothko.

I know that guy.

But do you know that guy?

Why those hazy rectangles?

And why should I care?

This is the case for Mark Rothko.

Marcus Rothkowitz was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Dvinsk, Russia.

They immigrated to Portland, Oregon in 1913,

but his father died just months after.

Marcus was a good student and won a scholarship

to Yale, where he did well and discovered

his leftist political leanings.

But he dropped out in his second year and moved to New York.

It was there he set his mind to becoming an artist

and studied at the Art Students League under Max Weber

and learned about Cubism and Matisse

and the German expressionists.

In the 1930s, he made paintings influenced

by Milton Avery and Matisse.

He changed his name to Rothko in 1940 and by the mid-'40s,

was trying out a little surrealism

with works like this and this that

drew from classical methods, tapping them as symbols

to discuss the human tragedy.

He also copied Joan Miro a bit by making pieces like this,

and Max Ernst a bit with pieces like this.

He and his buddy Adolph Gottlieb were

reading a bunch of Nietzsche and Jung at the time

and thinking about the unconscious.

With Fascism rampant in Europe and World War II

underway, Rothko and other artists at the time

thought that following artistic tradition was not

only irrelevant, but irresponsible.

He and Gottlieb write a letter to "The New York Times"

in June of 1943 saying, "There is no such thing

as good painting about nothing.

We favor the simple expression of complex thought."

Rothko wanted to answer the big questions,

and he was trying to find his own way to do that.

Large, flat, misty areas of color

started appearing in his paintings.

The works became more and more reduced

and simplified and geometric until he went

completely abstract in 1947.

By 1950, he had found his jam, and then

he just kept on doing it.

At the time, Rothko's paintings were utterly new.

Before then, color was usually tied to narrative content.

But Rothko was asking color alone to draw out emotion.

Yes, he did basically the same thing again and again from 1949

until his death in 1970.

But for him, it was an extremely useful and seemingly

inexhaustible structure within which

he said he could deal "with human emotion;

with the human drama, as much as I

could possibly experience it."

He said this style offered him "the elimination

of all obstacles between the painter and the idea,

and between the idea and the observer."

By getting rid of anything that triggered history or memory

or narrative or even geometry, he

was trying to create an overwhelming sensory experience

for the viewer through monumentality, simplicity,

and stillness.

Many have described standing before a Rothko

as a religious experience.

He would layer glazes of color to build

hues so deep and rich that they seemed to glow, something

Renaissance artists like Titian and Giorgione also

did to great effect.

The symmetry of Rothko's work also connects it

to religious painting.

Collector Dominique de Menil said

Rothko's paintings evoke "the tragic mystery

of our perishable condition.

The silence of God.

The unbearable silence of God."

In 1964, de Menil and her husband John

commissioned Rothko to paint a set of murals

for an octagonal chapel in Houston, Texas, which

you can visit today.

The murals are somber, using dark maroon, purplish red,

and black.

With these, he wanted to create a sense of enclosure

and a space for meditation.

Rothko was a deeply troubled and depressive man.

He took his work very seriously and spent a great deal of time and focus and angst

in creating each of them.

In 1958 he was asked to create a set of murals for the Four

Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building in New York.

Calling it "A place where the richest bastards in New York

will come to feed and show off," he set to his task

using a dark palette and planned for the enormous paintings

to hang oppressively overhead, wanting

to make the viewers feel they are trapped in a room where

all the doors and windows are bricked up so that all

they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.

But he eventually decided to hold back the paintings

and instead gave them to the Tate in 1969,

where they still hang today.

Rothko strictly controlled the environment of his paintings,

demanding they be shown in low light,

in groups, encountered at close quarters,

and never mixed with work by other artists.

He did this not to be difficult, but because he cared deeply

that you have an immersive, transcendent experience.

You're not looking at the paintings.

You're with them and within them.

More than anything, Rothko wanted

to make you feel something, to encounter the undefinable,

to stare into the void, to confront

universal human tragedy.

This isn't painting about nothing.

It's a painting about everything.

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