Mark Rothko, the painter famous for his luminous abstract canvases, spent several years in the late 1930s and early ’40s writing a book about the meaning of art. Edited by his son Christopher, Rothko’s uncompleted manuscript, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, reveals a man struggling to make a case for the highest ideals of Western culture at a time when crass popular taste and American regionalism were conspiring against the values he held dear. During these years, Rothko worked in a melancholy Expressionist style that was just beginning to be influenced by Surrealism. The hovering rectangles of color that would put him on the modern art map were still a decade away. While this book will no doubt be important to Rothko scholars, it is a period piece, relying on a form of rhetoric and a belief system that can be exasperating to modern readers. Windy chapters on such topics as and “The Integrity of the Plastic Process, and ” studded with references to Plato and Leonardo, and “truth and ” and and “unity, and ” are Rothko’s stock in trade. He never mentions his own paintings and refers to a few other living artists only in passing. And yet–as Christopher Rothko points out in his clear-eyed and useful introduction–the process of wrestling ideas onto the page may have helped the artist find a personal means of expressing the and “tragic emotionality and ” that he believed to be the essence of all great art. Rothko longed to discover a new, post-Christian and “myth and ” that could express a unified outlook on life by embodying and “the world of ideals. and ” Little did he realize at the time that the resolution of his dilemma would be based on a radically new approach to handling paint and using color. –Cathy Curtis

The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko (2006-03-31) PDF

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