Word: rothko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Push-Pull Theory. Its variety, if not infinite, was impressive. Mark Rothko reduced his palette to the softest shades and his compositions to a pair of rectangles in tandem. That commanding teacher Hans Hofmann preached what he called the "push-pull" theory of colors in tension-and practiced it to perfection. De Kooning restored the name of action to artistic thought, slashing at his canvases with inspired passion. David Smith took the grand gesture to sculpture, mounting one stainless steel shaft upon another in marvels of cliff-hanger balance. Later artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella solidified...
...terrifying women. Franz Kline's huge black-on-white compositions showed no more sophistication than a Chinese ideograph, but they conveyed the energy of the man that made them-and commanded a whole wall rather than a corner of a scroll. The smoldering color clouds of Mark Rothko drew a viewer in like a smoke-filled room, where unidentified objects lurk just beyond the eye's peripheral vision...
Lingering Symbols. The dream totems and the enigmatic pictographs of the early canvases of Adolph Gottlieb, Pollock and Rothko also betrayed surrealist origin. As Curator Rubin observes, the moody, poetic, apocalyptic spirit that broods over explicitly surrealistic pictures lingers in the later, totally abstract canvases of these same artists. To emphasize this point, Rothko's Magenta, Black, Green on Orange is placed in a small, partially darkened, melancholy chapel-like gallery, while the spiky Gothic tracery of Clyfford Still's painting, 1947-J shares a gallery with four other Stills-and a spiky Gothic metal sculpture by Theodore...
...Mark Rothko, D.F.A., artist. In your paintings, you have attained a visual and spiritual grandeur whose foundation is the tragic vein in all human existence...
Irwinophiles who survive the initial discomfort say that they eventually discover an ineluctable serenity in the artist's work. The National Gallery's assistant director, J. Carter Brown, considers Irwin one of the most talented artists to come along since Mark Rothko. The Metropolitan Museum's contemporary-art curator, Henry Geldzahler, bought an Irwin in 1962, despite the fact that looking at it made him "feel ill and weak all over." It now hangs in his bedroom, where he maintains that it exerts "a calming effect...