White Over Red, (1957). |
During this time, Rothko's fine
art painting featured bright and vibrant colours, and in particular
used a lot of reds and yellows. Examples include Yellow Greens,
1953 (Estate of Frederick Weisman); Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue,
1953 (Private Collection); Saffron, 1957 and Blue, Yellow, Green
on Red, 1954 (The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Beginning
in 1957 and continuing to his later years, Rothko tended to adopt a darker
palette. He used fewer reds, yellows and oranges and instead used more
browns, grays, dark blues and black. He applied very thin layers of paint
over each other, which allowed the colours to radiate through, giving
a sense of drama and light.
As a man Rothko was constantly wracked
with anxiety and uncertainty about his ability as an artist. But the art
critics liked what they saw. In 1950 the Museum of Modern Art bought one
of his paintings and his works were represented at shows all over the
world during the decade. Fortune Magazine named him as an artist to invest
in, and for the first time in his life, his finances began to improve.
However, despite his rising fame he feared that people did not understand
his art, that they were just buying it out of fashion rather than because
they grasped his concept. In 1958 he received an important commission
to furnish the newly finished Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York.
This was the first time Rothko produced a connected series of works. He
painted approximately 40 in all, and used a warm palette of dark red and
brown. This brought him huge publicity, and more collectors queued up
to purchase his works.
However by the 1960s and with the advent
of Pop Art, the popularity of Abstract Expressionism began to wane. Young
artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein
became the fashionable names of the day. Rothko described them as 'charlatans
and young opportunists'. But the critics interpreted the rise of Pop Art
as the death knoll for Abstract Expressionism.
But in 1964 he received a lucrative commission to paint a series of wall
paintings for the chapel at the St Thomas Catholic University in Houston.
Unfortunately he did not live to see the paintings installed, although
he told his friends that he felt the chapel was his most important artistic
statement. In 1970 his assistant found him dead in his kitchen. He had
sliced his arms open with a razor. He was 66 years old.
In 2005 one of Rothko's paintings broke
an all-time record for a post-war painting when it sold for $22.5 million
at auction. Today he takes his place at one of the most important painters
in the history of art of the post-war
modernist era. His radical refusal to copy nature reduced painting to
large, vibrant fields of colours. His works have influenced numerous painters
from many different schools of art, and he is regarded as one of America's
major artists of the 20th century.
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