Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple (1949) (84 1/2 x 68 1/2 inches)
Mark Rothko at Kunsthalle Hamburg Retrospektive (1961)
“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on …..The fact that 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 painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
Evidently I missed the point somewhat when I viewed many of his paintings in Chicago and New York in the 1960s, for when I heard that Mark Rothko had commited suicide I was surprised and confused, naively assuming that the act of creating such powerful and beautiful works would be more than enough to sustain the desire to live in such a great artist.
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