Abstract masters Pollock and Rothko

At the beginning of the 20th century, various artistic currents converged in New York, influencing a large number of American artists. It just so happened that after the war, New York became the center of the world's art, and the government, the business community, and the art merchants were all looking forward to the birth of influential works. American Abstract Expressionism arose in the 1950s, represented by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and so on.

Jackson Pollock

（J.Jackson Pollock 1912-1956）

Jackson Pollock was a pioneer of American Abstract Expressionism, a well-known action painting artist, one of the representative figures of new American painting in the world after World War II, and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, whose works have an unforgettable natural quality.

Pollock came to New York in 1930 as a young art student from Los Angeles. In his classes at the Art Student Union, he was mentored by the painter Thomas Hart Benton and immersed himself in surrealism and the subconscious.

In 1947, he began to use the "drip painting method", laying a huge canvas flat on the ground, splashing paint on the canvas with a box, stick or brush with a hole, and spraying thin paint with the help of a sprayer; walking around the canvas when painting, so that the composition has no center and the structure is unrecognizable; and repeated unconscious movements to obtain a picture of vertical and horizontal twisting lines and changing colors. The influence of the Surrealist school on him can be felt in his pursuit of subconscious extremes. Pollock's drip paintings hide dramatic accidents at will, and passions exude the freedom and wildness of color. As a result, his technique has original and alternative visual perception, which brings great shock to American art today, and is regarded as the beginning of the era of American abstract art that was free from European influence, and is also regarded as a symbol of the American free spirit. "No. 5 of 1948" is Jackson Pollock's masterpiece, the canvas is nailed to the fiberboard, the canvas color is yellow, white, maroon and black, seemingly random splash, color, line has its own logic, improvised visual rhythm in the movement. His work is not so much a painting as a record of the fluid properties of the painting itself.

After becoming famous, Pollock called himself "the greatest painter in the world", but he was a drunkard and drunkard. Back in the late 1940s, art critic Greenberg reminded him that he was "repeating himself." But at this time, his unabated fame made him popular with an unknown audience, and he became the spoiled child. He was accustomed to the spoils of fate, and on the evening of August 11, 1956, the 44-year-old Pollock was drunk and took his lover Ruth and another woman for a drive, and the car crashed into a large tree, killing him and Ruth on the spot. A generation of painters thus ended his life and short artistic career.

In November 2006, one of Pollock's paintings, No. 5 of 1948, sold the highest painting in the world at $140 million and was collected by a Mexican financier.

Mark Rothko

（Mark Rothko1903-1970）

In 1913, Rothko's family immigrated to the United States from Russia and settled in Portland, Oregon. As a young man, he was preoccupied with political and social issues. He entered Yale In 1921 but dropped out two years later. In 1925 he settled in New York City and began painting. Although he received brief guidance from his teachers, he was largely self-taught. Unlike many abstract expressionists, Rothko never relied on techniques such as violent brushstrokes or paint dripping splashes. Instead, his almost gestureless paintings seem to float parallel to the plane by juxtaposing large areas of melted colors in an indeterminate atmospheric space. He spent the rest of his life refining this artistic style through constant simplification, and his work was limited to two or three soft-edged rectangles that almost filled the vertical format of the size of a wall.

Rothko's popularity steadily increased in the 1950s, and economic conditions improved. In 1958, he was selected as the American delegate at the Venice International Exposition and owned a studio in the town of Province, a massachusetts artists' colony. For eight years, from 1958 to 1966, Rothko worked continuously on 14 huge canvases (the largest one was about 3×5 meters) before being placed in a non-denominational church in Houston, Texas, known as Roscoe Church after his death. The paintings are virtual monochromes of dark glowing brown, maroon, red, and black, and the gloomy intensity of the work reveals the profound mystery of Rothko's later years. He paints under the intense light of the theater stage, but when exhibiting, the lights are arranged to be dimmed, so that his strong large color blocks protrude from the environment, as if suspended in the air, causing a strong shock. Those huge monochromatic paintings are accompanied by the fusion of colors, giving people the deepest imagination and interpretation, and after breaking the reproduction and narrative functions of painting, Abstract Expressionist painting completes the function of directly and sincerely transmitting human emotions. In 1961, Rothko held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which reached the peak of his artistic career. Collectors, brokers, critics flocked to the scene, and even President Kennedy came to cheer it up.

Then the rise of American pop art challenged Abstract Expressionism, and coupled with the gradual tension in the marriage relationship, Rothko deteriorated his mood and began to drink heavily, seriously damaging his nerves and health. In 1968, Rothko, who was diagnosed with aortic aneurysm, began to live in isolation, his depression gradually worsened, and finally fled to the studio alone, spending a full year to complete the last batch of works of his life, leaving only black and gray, indicating death. On February 25, 1970, he ended his life in New York at the age of 66 by cutting his wrists.

In 2012, Rothko's orange, red, yellow work sold for $86.88 million (about 547 million yuan) at Christie's in New York.

Both are important artists in the history of Western art, and they have found their own style, which has influenced many people and is undoubtedly great.

■Yang Dawei (Zhejiang University of Communication)

Source: Fine Arts Newspaper