Cultural Industry Herald, No. 2, 2019
Author: Sun Yueqi
Unit: Chinese Min University
The Lonely Sensitive Man: On the Spiritual Implications of Mark Rothko's Work
History without a subject is a false history, and history without spiritual refinement is a circular history. Art, as a figurative expression of human consciousness, cannot fundamentally change the world, however, the author's philosophical thinking about an era carried behind the work can to a certain extent prompt people to reflect on their own actions in this period, thus subtly influencing and transforming the world.
The twentieth century is the era when human beings entered the mechanical age, the era when human beings are full of doubts and wandering about their own alienation in the new era, and it is also the era of achieving a generation of masters. From the perspective of art history, during this period, the immortal modernist artists represented by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) of the United States were born, who were diligent, sincere, enthusiastic and sensitive, and full of concern and doubt about the direction of the country, society and human nature in the industrial era.
In order to express this unprecedented sense of loneliness and insecurity in a new language, they have constructed a new artistic concept and a clear spiritual context with their unique perspective, creating an artistic miracle. This article is intended to take the analysis of Mark Rothko's works as the starting point, analyze from the aspects of modernist emotions, artistic concepts and art forms, understand Rothko's art, and interpret the author's spiritual world and the value of modernist art.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="55" > the rise and fall of the Western modernist school </h1>
Looking at any historical period of mankind, behind a profound work of art, there are often one or more key historical events. The conflict of values has prompted human beings to conduct self-reflection again and again, and actively try various ways to expose problems, express emotions, and resolve contradictions. Along with this, new ideas and new cultures have emerged. The modernist art genre, as the crystallization of human art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, is no exception, and it was born during the social transformation of the second industrial revolution of mankind.
In the late nineteenth century, with the vigorous development of the Second Industrial Revolution, the cultural traditions of mankind for thousands of years were subverted. The wave of modern industry and urbanization swept across Europe, and the high degree of industrial production made people gradually alienated from each other, what Marx called "the alienation of man", in such a context, the individual felt unprecedented loneliness. In the early twentieth century, two world wars broke out, people used scientific and technological means to invent a large number of weapons of destruction to massacre the same kind, and the rational spirit and humanitarian ideals such as freedom, equality, and fraternity born in the Enlightenment were dissolved by the cruel war of reality... Western civilization was in the midst of a profound crisis, and modernism came into being.
In literature, modernist writers such as Kafka and Beckett were born; in fine arts, artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky, and Mark Rothko were born. Whether it is literary or fine art creation, because its works are mostly abstract, grotesque in content, and emotionally negative, critics call such works: modernism.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="55" > modernist school of painting as an elite culture</h1>
In a more general sense, the concept of modernism refers specifically to the modern tradition of high art. Fundamentally, a true modern art may distinguish itself not only from classical, academic, conservative art genres, but also from the independent character of popular and popular cultural forms. As an avant-garde art, unlike "kitsch" (Greenberg 1939, 8–12), modernism falls into the category of elite culture.
At the end of the 1960s, American Abstract Expressionism went from its heyday in the 1950s to a decline, and the Pop Art community represented by Andy Warhol rose to fame, and screen printing, commercial consumption, and kitsch entertainment quickly conquered the art world. In the view of the modernist master Rothko, he longed for tranquility more than this era of rhetoric, activity, and consumption.
In June 1969, a year before his death, Rothko received an honorary doctorate from Yale University, lamenting: "When I was young, it was a lonely thing to do in art: no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. It was a golden age when we had nothing, we were not afraid of losing anything, we had imagination. The situation is completely different now. It was an age of redundancy, activity, and consumption. ...... But I believe that those who work in art are eager to find a state of tranquility. ”[2]
Rothko's exclamation represents the common wandering of a part of the social group at that time: in the era of prosperous capitalism, everything seemed to contain business opportunities. In the field of art, it is manifested as: the traditional appreciation value and worship value of art are gradually used and exchanged in the United States at that time, which is in an era of great increase in productivity, material abundance, social upper-class groups are more inclined to hedonism, and likewise, the middle class is more inclined to entertainment consumption, which makes the modernist school of painting that requires viewers to have a certain cultural literacy and can concentrate on thinking to be understood. This also confirms Benjamin's prediction and analysis of capitalist society as early as 1935: in the decay of the bourgeoisie, focused behavior became an unsocial behavior, as opposed to distraction as a way of playing social behavior. [3]
Based on the social background of Europe and the United States at that time, it can be said that the reason for the gradual decline of the modernist school in the late 1960s was that the incompatibility between the popular mass culture and the elite culture with a high threshold of intellectual cultivation was that the public sought pastime, while art required the recipient to pay attention. [4] What it requires is a calm contemplation in front of the work, and most people in European and American society at that time were not willing to accept this.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="55" > Self-contained Mark Rothko </h1>
Unlike many modernist artists who have transformed into commercial art creation in order to make a living, a small number of artists, represented by Rothko, have chosen to stick to modernism alone. Roscoe was uneasy about the sudden prosperity of European and American societies, disgusted with the profit-seeking ethos of commodifying everything, and the tragic Korean and Vietnam Wars in the United States on the other side of the ocean, so he always maintained a strong confrontation with his time, which he did not identify with, but there were many misunderstandings about him. [5]
Influenced by the early masters of abstraction, Rothko's works were mostly expressed in abstract forms and flowing colors, and contemporaries of art critics defined Rothko's paintings with "abstract expressionism". Among them, the critic Emily Gnaule called Rothko's paintings "decorative" in an article in the New York Herald Tribune,[6] while another critic, Harold Rosenber, explained Rothko's paintings with the concept of "action painting". These misinterpretations greatly annoyed Rothko, who refused to label and misinterpret his creations.
Instead, Rothko actively deviated and confronted abstraction. He disagreed with the critics' explanations, and he resented the critics' comparison and categorization of themselves with others, especially the dislike of being included in the categories of expressionists and formalists. Similarly, Rothko rarely explains his paintings. He believed that all explanations would destroy the totality of painting, nothing more than attaching to a distorted understanding of painting. He believes that there is a natural communication between the painting and the viewer, and that interpretation instead constitutes an offense to the painting. [7]
It is necessary to mention here that the mechanism of "synonymous criticism" [8] adopted by the American art criticism community in the 1950s[8] is mentioned. From the perspective of aesthetic modernity, this approach has enabled the art movement to be effectively promoted, and a set of artistic stylistic and formalistic ways of writing the history of modern art[9] has been constructed, which has enabled American abstraction to successfully establish its international status. From the perspective of applicability, the mechanism of common name criticism is more from the level of art form, summarizing the commonality of an art genre, but at the same time it also ignores the heterogeneity and pluralism of the artist itself. [10] This is why Rothko strives to maintain a strong individualist color in the picture rather than being easily included in a certain category and homogenized, losing the unique thinking and soul he has given to the work itself.
Focus on the catharsis of sensual, religiously charged emotions, rather than the formal composition and application of pure reason. This is the biggest difference between Rothko's work and abstract formalism. "Painting a small picture is about putting you outside the experience, like looking at a landscape in a stereoscopic film or looking at something with miniature glasses, but if you draw a big picture, you're in it." [11] Rothko aspires to evoke the viewer's emotional experience in a unique language. His works are like a series, each of which pours out different emotions in different colors, and at the same time connects them to a complete story.
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Some of the pictures are from the Internet, invaded and deleted
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