“The vibrant late works on paper contain a force not experienced in the earlier small works…These late creations, with their dense unmodulated surfaces, do not flicker with light; rather they generate a strong, constant glow.”
MUSEE D’ORSAY, PARIS, FRANCE
Mark Rothko Masterfully Defies His Medium with Luminous Color
An illuminating vision of shimmering color and peerless painterly finesse, Mark Rothko’s Green, Blue, Green from 1969 is a dazzling embodiment of the artist’s legendary abstractions. Emerging from a flickering ground of hazy teal, three fields of rich color, varying in tonality, emit a sumptuous glow. Built up of innumerable delicate strokes and thin washes, these luminescent forms emphatically attest to the artist’s mastery of light, color, and form. An exquisite example from Rothko’s later years, Green, Blue, Green exemplifies the artist’s work in a medium that bore an increasingly profound significance in the twilight years of his career when, tirelessly seeking to broaden the horizons of his artistic practice, he focused his energies upon exploring the absolute limits of painting on paper. Conjuring the radiant sublimity of his most esteemed monumental canvases, Green, Blue, Green epitomizes Bonnie Clearwater’s description of these works: “the vibrant late works on paper contain a force not experienced in the earlier small works…These late creations, with their dense unmodulated surfaces, do not flicker with light; rather they generate a strong, constant glow.” (Exh. Cat., New York, American Federation of the Arts, Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, 1984, pp. 54-55)
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Right: Emil Nolde, Landscape of North Friesland, 1938-1945
Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany
An exquisite summation of the artist’s signature practice, Green, Blue, Green represents the breathtaking culmination of Rothko’s career-long pursuit of aesthetic transcendence through the conflation of pure color and light. While predominantly known and revered for his corpus of towering abstract canvases, Rothko produced a number of exceptional paintings on paper throughout his career that, in their subtly variegated hues and inherent luminosity, rank among the richest orchestrations of color within his output. Many of the greatest of these works date from the late 1960s, when, under doctor’s orders not to lift heavy canvases, Rothko turned to the lighter and more versatile medium of paper. Making good upon this apparent limitation, Rothko reached an apex in his artistic ambition, producing a series of works on paper as emotionally stunning as his best-known canvases. Paper, with its paradoxical ability to both absorb and reflect light, in many ways reinvigorated the artist’s quest to create nuanced luminosity within a reductive composition. Describings the significance of the medium within Rothko’s oeuvre, Clearwater notes: “These works…are essential to a fuller understanding of Rothko’s career. Together with the canvases, the works on paper chart the artist’s quest for an elemental language that would communicate basic human emotions and move all mankind.” (Ibid., p. 17)
Market Precedent: Mark Rothko
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Art © 2020 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Against a velvety ground of deep emerald paint the rich, painterly forms of Green, Blue, Green suggest both feverish movement and tranquil repose, emanating an enthralling tension that invites the viewer to lose him or herself completely in the diaphanous fields of unadulterated color. The present work evokes an analogous sense of pensive introspection and reflective thought, much like Henri Matisse in his contemplative French Window at Collioure from 1914. Dominating the upper register of the composition, the feathered edges of the largest green form push into the oceanic depths beneath and the subtle variations in intensity within the form itself create a sense of movement. In contrast, the more meditative passage of inky indigo subtly structures the painting, grounding the lush verdant forms above and below. The work’s resultant dynamism necessitates the viewer’s constant attention and provides an endlessly engaging experience. Here, Rothko attains chromatic resonance through the meticulous aggregation of translucent veils of brushed pigment, with especially close attention paid to the areas where the forms meet. Towards the feathered edges of the purple band, a panoply of blues, greens and lilacs emerge, rewarding close examination. Similarly, despite the disparity in tone between the green forms, the color fields equilibrate: the light of one form countered by the weightier density of the other as they hum quietly over navy ground. Among the most spectacular examples of the artist’s works on paper, Green, Blue, Green emanates an ethereal reverberation of color impossible to reproduce in illustration.
"The paradox implicit in Rothko's best work is that he wished also to name the light itself and not only the things it illuminated. How often in his later works there are flares of burning light, sparks that grow uncannily..."
The present work elicits a sensation of deep somatic absorption and introspection, causing the viewer to sink into a deep reverie, a pensiveness that Dore Ashton eloquently describes: “The interior realm was where Rothko wished to or perhaps could only live, and what he hoped to express. The ‘theater of the mind,’ as [Stéphane] Mallarmé called it, was immensely dramatic for Rothko. His darkness at the end did allude to the light of the theater in which, when the lights are gradually dimmed, expectation mounts urgently.” (Dore Ashton, About Rothko, New York 1983, p. 189) Through the artist’s prototypical layering of thin washes of paint over one another, often allowing colors from initial layers to flicker through the subsequent coats of pigment, Rothko imbues the present work with a depth and richness observed in his best-known paintings. As the purple, blue and green tones hover against one another, the viewer is transported into a deeply contemplative state archetypal of the artist’s most accomplished chromatic compositions.
