Word: rothko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...search of a style after World War II, the place to be was San Francisco. The California School of Fine Arts, which in the 1930s had brought Diego Rivera to San Francisco, had suddenly burst into life again, this time around two fiery abstract painters, Russian-born Mark Rothko, who was scrubbing canvases with shimmering bands of color, and North Dakota-born Clyfford Still, whose outsize paintings suggested both Western canyons and bark peeled from a tree. Talented younger men (notably Sam Francis and Lawrence Calcagno) spread the Rothko-Still gospel in staccato dab-and-dash across...
Split Coming. Almost as suddenly as it arose, the San Francisco Renaissance split. Still and Rothko departed for the East Coast. Dean of those who remained was Boston-born David Park, and in 1951 he abruptly turned his back on abstract expressionism and won an award in the San Francisco Annual for a painting, Boys on Bicycles, in which the boys were boys, and the wheels were round. "As you grow older," Park said, "it dawns on you that you are yourself-that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want...
...impact of the festival and the museum has been widespread. Last week, for the first time in its 89-year history, Provincetown's weekly Advocate went to 16 pages. More artists have taken up residence; Milton Avery, John Hultberg, Mark Rothko have made Provincetown their summer home. New galleries are selling paintings faster than in Manhattan. More than just good business, 1958 has brought sparkling new life to the old culture of Provincetown...
...doing in enigmas that would win kudos from a Zen master. Painter Franz Kline, asked what he was trying to express, replied: "When I was young, I was 19. Does that answer your question?" With few exceptions, critics do little better. Art News once described one of Mark Rothko's works as "haunted, like the shining skin of an opulent eggplant, by the clay-colored echo of a final and unbreakable promise." The point, as Louis Armstrong once said of jazz, seems to be: "When you got to ask what it is, you'll never get to know...
From the splashes of Pollock and De Kooning to the finely executed color planes of Rothko. the movement has a wide range of identifiable styles. Each painter produces his own subjective expression without regard for what it communicates. The absence of any recognizable visual imagery has struck many critics and philosophers, like Theologian Paul Tillich, as a cult of meaninglessness, proof of "the emptiness of our existence in industrial society." Other critics have an entirely different perspective, see in the abstract-expressionist breakthrough the opening of a brave, new, unfettered world of art. Worcester Museum Director Daniel Catton Rich finds...