The New Criterion
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ArtNovember 2012 Mark Rothko: the decisive decade by Karen Wilkin On “Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade, 1940–1950,” which opened at the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, on September 14, 2012 and remains on view through January 6, 2013. Mark Rothko’s so-called “classic style” works, with their hovering rectangles of insubstantial color, are among the best known and most passionately admired of abstract paintings, as easily recognized and readily parodied as Jackson Pollock’s poured tangles and, it seems, far more beloved. But Rothko didn’t paint the first of his “classic style” compositions until late in 1949, when he was forty-six. (Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903, he died, a suicide, in New York in 1970.) When he began the series that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life and define him as an artist, he had been painting for a quarter of century and exhibiting for more than twenty years; he began to study with Max Weber at the Art Students League in 1925 and was included in his first New York group show in 1928. The floating rectangles that are now synonymous with Rothko’s name were not the result of a sudden de ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 November 2012, on page 42 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Mark-Rothko--the-decisive-decade-7477
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by Karen Wilkin On the refurbished Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and "The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America" at the newly renovated Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. by Karen Wilkin On “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. by Karen Wilkin On “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900” at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. by Mario Naves On "Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. On "The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism” at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine.
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