Mark Rothko (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Jeffrey Weiss’s lavishly illustrated volume includes four essays from several contributors which consider different formal and thematic elements which were of special concern to the painter. John Gage’s essay focuses on Rothko’s unique palette and the ways in which color ultimately became the subject of Rothko’s mature work. Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty discuss the period of Rothko’s emphasis on dark colors in the context of his personal and intellectual interests in the tragic. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro provides a detailed examination of Rothko’s technical concerns. The book’s final essay, by Jeffrey Weiss, draws together the threads of the other authors’ interests by reflecting on Rothko’s paintings as environments, in and of themselves.

The catalog also includes a detailed and well-conceived chronology of important events in Mark Rothko’s professional and personal lives. This concise biographical element, researched and organized by Jessica Stewart, is given special value and resonance with the inclusion of quotations from Rothko himself. These comments by the painter deepen and illuminate the historical materials in the chronology in a very positive way.

This theme of voices is a consistent subtext to the commentaries on the paintings in this catalog. In addition to Rothko’s voice and the voices of scholars commenting on his career, MARK ROTHKO includes five short interviews with American modernist painters— Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and George Segal—who describe the impact of Rothko’s paintings on their careers. The combination and interaction of these multiple perspectives on Rothko’s importance to modern American art results in a uniquely informative and readable volume.

The one gap in the materials collected in MARK ROTHKO is the lack of a bibliography or exhibition history to guide readers to further resources on the painter. The introduction to the volume makes clear that the missing bibliography was not an oversight, but a conscious decision to defer the task of presenting those materials to a catalogue raisonne being prepared by David Anfam, of the National Gallery of Art. Taken together, the beautifully prepared and splendidly presented images of Rothko’s work and the cogent essays which appear in this volume, and Anfam’s carefully researched catalogue, MARK ROTHKO: THE WORKS ON CANVAS: CATALOGUE RAISONNE (1998) will stand for years as the definitive resources on the work of this most expressive and enigmatic of American abstract expressionists.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIV, August, 1998, p. 1951.

San Francisco Chronicle. June 7, 1998, p. REV4.

The Times Higher Education Supplement. November 20, 1998, p. 22.

The Times Literary Supplement. November 6, 1998, p. 4.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, December 13, 1998, p. 5.