Mark Rothko denied his abstract paintings were in any way supposed
to be landscapes, although he is
reported to have said at the 1964 Turner
show in New York « That chap Turner learned a lot from me. »
That year there
was a New Yorker cartoon with
a modish couple staring out
at a sunset over the sea, the view resembling
a Rothko painting :
The caption: “Now,
there’s a nice contemporary sunset.” The cartoon
reminds me of comments on
Turner in Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying
(1889):
« Nobody of any
real culture, for instance, ever talks
nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.
Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in
art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called
it. Of course I had to look
at it. She
is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny
nothing. And what was it? It was
simply a very second-rate
Turner, a Turner of a bad period,
with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated
and over-emphasised. »
The question this raises
in relation to Rothko is over the extent to which our aesthetic
response to landscapes is now affected
by the form of Rothko’s paintings, even though Rothko himself was engaged in abstract expressionism. And whether this in turn leads
artists to adopt Rothko-like compositions for their landscapes, as in Andreas
Gursky’s Rhein (1996) :
__________
Trouvé là.
Retour ici.