NO. 5/NO. 22
MARK ROTHKO, 1950 (dated on reverse 1949)
By 1950, the rectangles are basically here. But this one still has a little scaffolding hanging around. Find the red band. Three skinny white lines run through it. They wobble. A few years from now, details like that are gone. Everything gets quieter. Right here, Rothko's still working it out. Now say something nice about the colors. Go ahead. Would've made him furious. In 1956, a writer named Selden Rodman gets Rothko talking. And Rothko tells him, flat out: I'm not an abstractionist. That he isn't interested in color for its own sake. He's interested in basic human emotions. Tragedy. Ecstasy. Doom. Not exactly paint-chip language. Then, two years later, Rothko actually writes down his recipe for a work of art. Seriously. Death. Sensuality. Tension. Irony. Wit and play. Chance. And then, at the bottom: "Hope. 10%." Ten percent. Apparently eleven would've been pushing it. That's Rothko. All this tragedy and doom, but wit is in there. Play is in there. Hope makes the list. And he thought the paintings actually worked. People cried in front of them. Rothko said those people were having the same religious experience he'd had while painting. He was completely sure something was getting across. How colored mud on a piece of cloth reaches into a stranger and turns something over... that part he couldn't explain. He just knew he'd watched it happen. So stop naming the colors for a second. See if anything happens.