In his final days, Mark Rothko painted the works very large, three meters high, and he believed that the ideal distance for viewers to view such paintings was forty-five centimeters. Imagine the scene from this: the rush of color blocks the viewer into an interior space, as if entering a dark, empty room. So far, the viewer is no longer a bystander, but a stakeholder in the journey of destiny; viewing itself is no longer a light, irrelevant act, but a journey full of dangers. "Forced to sink completely into his work" is like entering a special space where tunnels connect tunnels, and there are deeper caves inside the caves, which are both abyss and forbidden areas.
The viewer must have the courage to invade a forbidden place in order to obtain the ultimate experience of life, just like a thief can only obtain valuable jewels after experiencing a near-death experience. The creator is not like this, those thin, obscure blocks, the rectangular stacks with blurred edges, and the expansion and contraction in all the pictures point to a strong, abnormal, conflicting theatrical world, "they imply the painter's desire , fear, and spiritual longing".
All Mark Rothko did was to get close, to the form of ancient myths, to spiritual clarity and transparency, to the upper reaches of a river. Rothko drew inspiration from the Nile, Mesopotamia, the Aegean Sea, from totem worship, black sculpture and ancient Greek sunsets, and from war and the Holocaust to find the spiritual appearance of this era. The stacked, floating rectangles and the hazy soft edges on the canvas are the monstrous figures and metamorphoses of our time, like Kafka’s beetles and Dariuszeck’s sow girls, even if they Weird, deformed, staggered, and insulated from beauty.
Rothko is regarded as one of the greatest abstract painters of the twentieth century. The artist himself believes that what he paints is by no means abstract, if abstract only refers to geometric color blocks. Admirers and admirers of Rothko's work longed for the artist to speak up and give him the keys to the mysterious city, but he didn't mention it. Even in a theoretical book called "The Artist's Reality", Rothko talked about Chardin, Monet, Cezanne, etc., and made a proper and detailed analysis of the work of many of their colleagues, but concealed himself. , even the artist's self-reported text is pitiful.
Critics were deeply disturbed that they were not given a viewing guide other than the work itself. They wondered if Mondrian, who created his famous red-yellow-blue composition, might have some hidden connection to Rothko. Rothko reacted violently, refusing to make any comparisons. He politely said that Mondrian was just cutting the canvas, while he was exploring new areas of color. In fact, he was tempted to say that Mondrian was nothing, that he was the real artist himself. Rothko is like a fiery child, always ready to defend his art in a loud voice, refusing to interpret it beyond the work itself. His early works also had titles that were easy to distinguish, such as "Blue Cloud", "Black on Crimson", etc., and later they were all named "Untitled".
"The Artist's Reality" was written before the birth of "Floating Rectangle", and it was shelved after completion. It was not published until it was accidentally discovered more than ten years after the painter's death, and it was shelved for several years. At that time, Roscott deliberately stopped the pace of creation and spent a year to write this book. But there is nothing to suggest that there is some degree of logical relationship between these words and the later "floating rectangle" and "soft edge line", and even the vague "foreseeing" does not appear in the book. This deeply displeased both professional critics and ordinary admirers of Rothko's paintings, and some even thought it was a deliberate mystifying trick by the painter.
My understanding is that the writing of this book did not solve Rothko's problems, just as problems that arise in writing can never be solved by "writing talks." Moreover, there is never any final solution. This point, presumably Rothko has already understood after completing the manuscript of the book. After that, a man destined to be a portrait of the temple, began his solemn, silent, boundless contemplative journey, which is also Rothko's archaeological journey in the land of the dead. I thought many times about the key words to interpret Rothko's art, and finally found that there is no such thing, just as future generations can't explain his boredom with his own life. There are so many mysteries in this world, and death may be one of the heaviest and most ethereal. Ultimately, Rothko committed suicide. He killed himself in the workshop bathroom. He fell in a pool of blood, with both wrists cut, and a blood-stained razor beside him. The blood flowing out of the blood vessels quickly solidified, like the red condensed on the canvas, the deep red, orange, magenta, chestnut red, and the blue, yellow, and cyan on the red, all turned into colorful fragments, turned into drama The suspended objects on the stage end with time and disappear with the evening wind.
two
Artists who have lived through World War II, Auschwitz, and the atomic bomb can no longer paint naked, well-proportioned, and robust figures that are the embodiment of beauty like their ancient Greek counterparts. Artists are looking for new expressions. Perhaps the experience of the sculptor Giacometti can provide some explanation for this. It was one day in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, Giacometti was sitting in the cinema of Montparnasse in Paris, and suddenly found that the face on the screen was no longer a face, but a black and white symbol, lost all meanings. He stopped staring at the screen, and turned to observe the people sitting beside him, who in his eyes had undergone a surprising change, turning into completely unknown visions. It's a magical moment. This accidental viewing experience allowed the artist to experience a "splitting moment" in the history of personal experience.
"The unknown became the reality around me, and everything on the screen was nothing... The reality changed completely... They never appeared, they were completely unknown, they were magical. The Avenue of Montparnasse is as beautiful, dreamy, and ecstasy as the Thousand and One Nights!"
Since then, the sculptor who "worked during the day and poured the results of his work into the Seine at night" began his crazy creation journey of. Those works are no longer "noble simplicity, quiet greatness", they are tall, deformed, gray and unique, as if they came from a century-old furnace, the residue after burning; but they are "beautiful like a pointer", both Hard and light, decadent and radiant. As Jean Genet said, Giacometti's figures are the glory of this broken world, built on the exchange of beauty, loneliness and pain with the many dead.
Like Giacometti, Mark Rothko is looking for a new way of expressing emotion, one that is pure and powerful, but also violent and radical. What he has to do is to re-establish the connection between life and painting, which was once interrupted or even destroyed by war and the Holocaust, and it is his responsibility to find them, not old and outdated connections, but new and oppressive , heavy and tyrannical, reminiscent of all great tragedies. Rothko has a soft spot for tragedy in all its forms.
In episode 8 of the BBC documentary The Power of Art, Mark Rothko wears a striped shirt, high myopia glasses and spends most of his time smoking a cigarette in the studio. The studio looked large and dark, with paintings taller than a person standing beside the walls, giving people a sense of solemnity. Whenever the painter speaks or meditates in front of the camera, smoke fills his face and around him, as if the painter is constantly swallowing some aerosol-like things. The contemplative man tries to pull through the clutter of minds to find every part of a great idea.
Matisse's "Red Studio" brought some inspiration to Rothko, who was trapped in a color prison. Magic and naive Matisse draws a river of colors from far away, they flow like aimless time and unconstrained space, and wherever they go, all objects in the studio are stained with red sap, Paintings no longer have centers, because all objects are centers. Color is no longer the dividing line between the shape and outline of an object, they merge into a whole and can coexist and dance with any color at will. Color is released in Matisse, as if a pair of invisible hands smashed, crumbled, and reduced old experience to nothing. Color is separated from the properties of objects and becomes an empirical color, which has nothing to do with the nature of objects and is closely related to the creator's mental state.
After seeing the cabin soaked in red paint, Rothko seemed to see a possibility. Not only colors, but the properties of anything can be released. He also realized that when the use of color is strong enough, there will be a rare driving force, almost primitive, but above all lines and compositions. Matisse's work excites Rothko, as if a person walking at night sees a dim light. But Rothko did not follow the path that Matisse blazed. He has his own path to follow. He is not looking for the path of the moment, but a path to eternity.
For many years, Rothko lived a simple, near-financial life, detesting all extravagance and waste. At the time, he painted ambitiously for one of New York City's most luxurious restaurants, the Four Seasons, only to make them shimmer above gluttonous eaters and devour them so much that they were offended and lost their appetites. Rothko wants to accomplish the salvation of people's hearts through art, especially when people are in a staggered and happy time.
When the painting was about to be completed, he took his family to the Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko was outraged by the grandeur and splendor of the buildings, the fragrant and dazzling diners, and the staggeringly expensive prices on the gilded menus. He realizes sadly that the people eating there don't pay attention to his paintings, they're just optional decorations, like a colorful, well-decorated wall. In the eyes of the rich and soulless diners, the artist's life and beliefs are not worth mentioning at all. Feeling humiliated, he resolutely returned the high deposit, and fell back into the hardships of life.
Rothko is seen as an irritable and irritable artist, both a conqueror in the spiritual realm and a wall-breaker in the real world. His huge body has been tilted toward the brink of death, and his empathy for the tragic fate of human beings allows him to find strong color blocks and soft blurred edges. Even if a person has never seen a painting and does not know what art is, he will probably be shaken by Rothko's paintings - if he has cried bitterly in the long night, he has the deepest pain and the most subtle emotions of being a human being. If you know it in your heart, you will not be indifferent.
A new kind of art was born, which is separated from people and events, shapes and compositions, and only arranges the sum in time and space relationship with a few arranged rectangular color blocks and limited colors. There is the strongest ecstasy and the deepest sadness among human emotions. It includes the emotions of all things in the world, from the time when the world opened up, to the human suffering in the era of the Holocaust in modern times, and it has been extended for thousands of years. All inclusive.
Once any viewer stands in front of such a painting for more than a few hours, his world is turned upside down, the joys and sorrows of life pouring in through the turbulent canvas. People are either weeping, crying or disheartened, all emotions are rendered and strengthened, and they return to a peaceful and tranquil state one by one.
The future channel has been opened, and people only need to step into it calmly and calmly.
three
Rothko's paintings often remind me of the representative work of Japanese architect Tadao Ando - the Church of Light. The architect left a cross-shaped cut in the church wall, through which light poured in, creating a special light and shadow effect, the cross of light. This design has become the finishing touch in the construction of the church, and is also the origin of the name "Church of Light".
In Houston, the Catholic University of St. Thomas, there is also a church named after Rothko. There are fourteen dark-colored murals painted by the artist in his later years, mainly in maroon, black and dark purple, dark rectangles with sharp edges. The edge lines that were charming like clouds in those days have long since disappeared from the painter's works. These final works are almost dull, dull and melancholy, like the situation of the artist in his later years. Fortunately, there is light in the atrium, like a waterfall falling from the dome, overflowing with light. The building is easily reminiscent of Michelangelo's Sistine Cathedral, and of The Last Judgment. Perhaps there is also the Matisse Church in the south of France, although the latter is completely different, like the flute of the Faun on a spring afternoon, melodious and silent.
In a documentary filmed by the BBC, Rothko mentioned that when he visited the stairwell of a medieval library, he was shocked by Michelangelo's frescoes, where the doors and windows were closed, "they were trapped in a room... All I can do is bang my head against the wall." This closed feeling inspired him. This is exactly what he wants to bring to the audience. Seeing this, I suddenly thought of Lu Xun's iron house and the groggy people inside. Back then, he wrote "The Scream" to wake up. A similar hope probably exists in Rothko, who painted for the Four Seasons Restaurant. He thought that art could quench appetite and give people the strength to forge ahead. The two of them were in the same wilderness, surrounded by nothing but the icy cemetery, the blue light of the dark night, and the song of the nightingale.
The job before Mark Rothko is: how to completely hide the light in the dark, just as the mountains are completely cut off by the clouds at a certain time, but everyone knows that they have not disappeared. What he wants to express is the darkness that contains the light, and express it in the form of dryness, coldness, and dullness. Many times, Mark Rothko didn't know where he was going, but he clearly knew he wasn't on his way to an outing or a picnic. Rothko has never been committed to entertaining the viewer's eyes. He is a fearless leader. With the power of faith, he turns the unfamiliar realm into a place of self-belonging, attracting more people to enter, and obtaining dual-visual and The solemn face of the spirit.
The Roscoe Chapel at the Catholic University of St. Thomas might be such a place. It is a coal stone that is about to go out in the center of the universe, a dark magnet, a huge energy field. The crowd is like iron filings, and the bustling attracts them, silently entering some kind of dream-like space. It was extremely dark, but there was a faint fire flickering, which was the light from the viewer's eyes.
I have only had a similar experience at very few moments in my life's journey. On a trip to the west, I walked across a desolate and vast desert in the evening. The camel bell was gone, the sunset was dim, and the golden edge of the gravel was taken away little by little. Suddenly, countless jumping beams shot into the night sky, as if they came from the outer space of Miao Yuan, but they were actually flashlights carried by people walking on the sand. Figures are scattered in the sand sea, only the light beams pass through time and space, and meet above the head, as if the light can be grasped by just reaching out. Another time, in the deep mountains of southern Zhejiang, in the area with the highest altitude, the mountain was already in the middle of the spring and the sun was warm, and there was fine snow falling at night in the deep mountains. There were two completely different worlds separated by one mountain. It feels strange, as if it has passed for years, no matter where you are, you can stay forever, without any distinction. I can't say why, over the years, these two unrelated encounters have always come to my mind, and there is some kind of implication in my life at this moment.
I think it is probably the unreasonable reassurance and calmness that it exudes, which I will remember in my heart. If I could go back in time, I would most like to go back to that room in the mountains and the deserted sand after sunset. I just want to go back and forth between these two places, watching the emerald stars in the desert sky, and the dew falling on the grass and trees in the mountains and fields, so as to spend the long time of this world.
Four
The works of the artists who came before them were numerous and magnificent, but they all belonged to the eternal past perfect tense. People can't restore the entire creative process from it, and piece together the trajectory of the flow in the spiritual realm. Art is not a product on the factory floor, with fixed and detailed production steps; it is fluid and unpredictable, and there is no trace. An accidental error, or even a careless distraction, can lead to a miracle. This is not only the secret of the art industry, but also the pure joy of the artist himself, a reward from God to the creator.
When the war was going on in the most tragic years, when the crisis in the moral field spread all over the world, Rothko, as an artist, realized the transformation of the style in his personal creative career. He broke away from the creation of the subway and the "metaphysical" theme, and walked into an image world dominated by "rectangle", which is a world of unrestrained, adventurous journeys, intuitive images, and even more vague collections - Ross Coe believes that "the subconscious does not represent the furthest, but the nearest coast of art".
Before embarking on this adventure, Rothko systematically eliminated figurative elements from his own paintings, opening a door to performance for himself. He describes his paintings as "drama", "the shapes in the paintings exist for the performer", the shape is no longer the shape itself, and has nothing to do with the concrete and visible experience, it points to the ardent passion, the determined self-determination And capture the mood of the times.
The contemporary poet Nishikawa once said that poetry should not only reflect the times, but also deal with the times. As an artist, creator of the world of images, when faced with war and carnage, Rothko is sensitively aware that everything familiar from the past can no longer express this era. Because people can no longer live as they used to. At first, Rothko chose mythological themes, with the "eagle" as the basic image, but he quickly gave up. Immediately afterwards, blurred overlapping "rectangles", along with soft edge lines like feathers or white clouds, appeared. Those images can be said to be groundbreaking. Extremely condensed expression, the picture is composed of only two or three rectangles and symmetrical overlapping color blocks, but it is full of plane tension and the rhythm of breathing that is difficult to capture.
How to achieve the depth of space in the plane, not the depth expressed by Surrealism or Cubism, this is the problem faced by Mark Rothko. In Rothko's paintings, the color blocks are not distinct and clear at a glance, but cover each other, forming a hazy and invisible visual sense; and the color blocks as the background suddenly emerge, as if breaking through many obstacles, from the abyss. emerge. In addition to the tension between the color blocks and between the color blocks and the background, there is also a transparent tulle-like edge, like light penetrating from the layered space, giving a strong dreamy feeling.
As critics have said, Rothko takes a vague form, not as definite and clear as Mondrian and Kandinsky, but this form is tightly glued to the artist's mood and emotion because it is full of emotions. Together. The picture is no longer a combination of large and small rectangles, but a layering of various color blocks, which themselves are a tactile universe. All the passions, sorrows and joys of fate can be confirmed from it. As the artist himself said, "a painting has nothing to do with experience, it is experience in itself".
The evolution of all styles comes from the heart, from the projection of the experience of the times in people's hearts. Grasping the essence of the spiritual life of this era, in the endless noise, distinguishing the deep, powerful and erratic sound, and distinguishing the exciting and unexpected part, has become the secret mission of the artist's long life.
five
It's hard to describe the subtle feeling of flipping through Rothko's album, it reminded me of the green grass I once walked through. I was there at dusk and twilight, not for the view, but I did step into a grand and never-returning scene. The fading skylight and the vague sense of urgency made me feel that the green grass around me seemed to be born for me, alive because of me.
It was a strange feeling, although being in the corner of the world, it seemed to be where the light was on the stage. All feelings and perceptions can be responded to in time, and they reverberate in your heart, like a stone thrown on the surface of a lake, instantly causing ripples and echoes.
These paintings, like lake water, are the ripples on the lake, the twilight shimmering in the ripples; they are mysterious and inexplicable revelations, both grand and deep, and unobstructed. The viewer is completely immersed in it, summoned by this, to the depths of the abyss or dream.
Rothko uses paintings to tell about transcendental experiences. It transcends time and space, has nothing to do with cause and effect, is above all possible experience, and is also outside the predictable logic of reality. It is a hypothetical situation, the "drama" that the artist strives for, and a mythological stage above the flowing water.
A dark, secret cave, and the entrance to all time-space relationships. From this, the viewer can see all kinds of things that human ancestors have experienced since ancient times: floods, mountain fires, wars, wars, famine, etc., and countless figures emerge in this fog, they are Apollo, Athena, Prometheus. Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Agamemnon, Hamlet, Oedipus, Macbeth, and our own hesitant figures are among them.
What the artist did on the screen seemed to be just a little deformation, but it caused such an uproar. Art is like a magical developing solution, which makes everything visible and invisible show a charming outline, revealing the essence of silence and isolation, which makes people fascinated.
It was the same trip to the west and the desert. The whole journey seemed to be going to a cold and secluded place, where only wind, gravel, and gray staggered time and space, only depleted riverbeds, stone statues in dark caves, and sunset. The swaying splendens and camel thorns in the middle, as if we are not to watch it, but to enter it, to experience a subtle atmosphere in that isolated geographical time and space, to experience the primitive and magnificent scenery. It is the sum total of all landscapes, flowing from the deepest and oldest earth, and once it appears, it never disappears.
Rothko's art is like that primitive and cold landscape, an eternal wilderness where people will stay in it for a long time as long as they enter. It is not only a landscape, but also a theater of the soul, a fierce and fiery testing ground for human nature. They are tense and oppressive, everywhere, like death in the abyss.
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