NO. 1 (UNTITLED)
MARK ROTHKO, 1948
Nothing in this painting has a name yet. Try it. A green... field? A few black scribbles. A blue brick. A little row of dark dabs with orange burning through. Tan fog over everything. Nothing you can point at and say: that. Which is exactly where Rothko was in 1948. For twenty years, the man painted things. Subway platforms. Bathers. Strange little beings doing ceremonies at the edge of the sea. And then, around 1947, the figures start dissolving. Not disappearing politely. Dissolving. Because Rothko had decided that almost everything was in the way. Memory. History. Geometry. The familiar identity of things. He wanted the feeling to get from him to you with nothing standing between. So these floating patches are what's left. People later called them the Multiforms. Rothko didn't love labels like that. He had his own stranger idea. He said his pictures were dramas, and the shapes were the performers. Not decorations. Performers. Organisms, he wrote, with their own will. And he meant it. He believed a finished picture was alive. That it lives by companionship, expands in front of the right person, and dies in front of the wrong one. He called sending a painting out into the world risky. Which sounds ridiculous until you stand here for a minute. The green holds the middle without touching anything. The black marks twitch around it. The edges fade in and out, like the painting is breathing. Thin drips run down, and he leaves them there. Even gravity gets a small part. In two years, these patches settle down. They stack. They widen. They become the rectangles hanging all around you. The famous ones. This is the audition.