Wine, Rust, Blue on Black

The following work is being considered for inclusion in the forthcoming Mark Rothko Catalogue Raisonné of Works on Paper, compiled by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.


In Mark Rothko’s Wine, Rust, Blue on Blue vivid, active forms radiate with an inner luminescence, their hues shifting from a band of red iron oxide warmed to a rich wine superimposed over larger rounded rectangle, burnished orange. Both are supported by a burst of Prussian blue, orange’s complementary color. The darker earthy surround enhances the indeterminacy of space, hue, movement, and light at play as if the three hovering passages were receding into deep introspection. Forcing his colors into their support the artist creates a minimally inflected overall sheen, except for the white issuing from behind the pedestal-like blue, a glimmer which suffuses the entire frontal plane with light. Here, shape and color are no longer guarantors of substance: while dense, these ethereal pastilles seem transparent, as if optically penetrable. There is a sense that the literal surface, saturated as it is in hue, is nonetheless floating, free of material weight in what can only be described as ambiguous space. What binds these seemingly loosened forms is the black framing edge, literally the panel on which the paper is mounted. With solemn force, the ink-like clean-edge “frame” holds in check the volatility and the exquisite grace of chromatic interior activity.

Rothko worked within the tradition of Abstract Expressionism insofar as his creations are expressionistic statements of materiality. Rather than foregrounding gesture or what has been called “action,” Rothko’s planes become emotive through the subtle play of surface event. Yet Rothko’s work, like Barnett Newman’s, can be distinguished from the painterly abstraction that characterized much of American art in the late 1940s and 1950s (one thinks of Willem de Kooning’s wet-into-wet impasto). It was a different sort of color-based abstraction that was less perturbed, forcefully frontal and operated in shallow space. With a belief that the unconscious activates emotion, Rothko expresses an existential moment of luminescence as if the cognitive function succumbs to the emotive. As Rothko recognized, his interests lay “only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point” (S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, p. 93-94).

Chromatic nuance abounds in Rothko’s works on paper through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Even as late as 1968, Rothko is drawing from his past: the chroma-suffused surfaces – the “wine” color in the present work is an example – found in the thirty mural works originally painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building from a decade earlier, some of which are now installed at the Tate Gallery, London, set up a clear relationship with the present work. An uncanny link between Wine, Rust, Blue on Black created in 1968 and the studies and final works for the for the Seagram commission of 1959 is evident, and bears a resonance that bespeaks a review or rehearsal of a period focused on the notion of framing in black, wine (maroon), and blue.

The present work glows with the acrylic paint, possible Magna, an acrylic resin miscible in mineral spirits, first developed by Sam Golden and Leonard Bocuour. The high-keyed blue would have been a significant example of this new paints’ ability to hold its color while applied thinly. Using paper to test this new medium, Rothko opened up his range to multiple palettes. Further, in this series of works on paper, of which Wine, Rust, Blue on Black is a prime example, the punctuation of blue recalls earlier multiform canvases, such as Untitled (Multiform), 1948. The complementary orange-blue pairing, where Rothko drips paint and soaks into the canvas, displays Rothko’s penchant for experimentation. The present work dates from the series completed just before Rothko suffered an aneurysm in the spring of 1968, after which he subsequently he turned to a fresh series works on paper in brown and grey when he moved to a studio in Provincetown.

There is a sense in which Rothko’s images defy description. For what we see depicted in Wine, Rust, Blue on Black is an emotional temperature, cool and warm. The veil-like field of color, the feathered and rounded superimposed forms appear almost as a unitary image, riveting the viewer to a single place before it. Their frontality, the absence of perspectival depth, the sense of intimacy and intensity, pulls the viewer into an intimate bond with his or her act of looking. One is caught up in a vortex of color and space, but also of materials – of painted surface, feathered edgings – so that texture and light, the tactile and the optical, become entwined. In this work, color becomes the bearer of expression and all but envelopes form; here, color is content. Ethereal forms fans out across the surface in a continuous unraveling that might extend infinitely. The sense that the surface continues beyond its material presence was essential to expressing the infinite space into which human desire might reach. The thinness of the paint application in Rothko’s work is a further expression of the hovering atmospherics that remind one more of transcendent realms than of the psychic human dramas enacted by the painterly abstractionists. Like poetry or music, in the suspended, pulsating rectangles, there is sensuality, what Rothko has called “a lustful relationship with the world” (A. Borchardt-Hume, ed., Rothko, London, 2008, p. 91).