Rothko and Matisse in Retrospect
MULLER, MARION
On Art ROTHKO AND MATISSE IN RETROSPECT MARION MULLER Retrospectives are a mixed blessing. On the plus side, they provide us the opportunity to scan an artist's entire creative life—to see the...
...But it is simply the wrong environment for Rothko...
...Just the opposite, he regarded the technique as a distinct advantage...
...One is the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum (through January 14...
...and The Italian Woman, The Moroccans and The Piano Lesson (1916), Matisse demonstrates his unique gift for simplifying his art...
...By divesting himself of all the isms, rules and schools, and by working, reworking and rethinking his creations, he reduced his images to simple lines, shapes and primary colorsto the purest essence of his idea...
...Whereas the usual exhibition presents a closely related body of work—with each piece reinforcing the other, and all of it leading to an intense encounter with the whole—the retrospective gives us too much to respond to...
...The little rabbit-warren rooms and dividers give a cramped and chaotic feeling...
...In them we see more clearly than anywhere else Matisse's complete mastery of line, which he choreographs on paper the way a dancer moves through space...
...But once Rothko began to turn away from the extraneous symbols and images, and to concentrate increasingly on pure color as his vehicle, he moved on to a rarefied plane as a painter...
...At the Guggenheim, the sweeping arcs, the continuous flowing movement, the inclined plane of the ramp propels us onward instead of nailing us to a spot...
...These pure color canvases of the late '40s and '50s, while devoid of imagery, are nonetheless loaded with subject matter for Rothko...
...Matisse loved the honesty and directness of cutting directly into color...
...But he did not bewail his handicap...
...I paint," he once said, "very large pictures...
...Organized as part of moma's 50th anniversary celebration, this is not so much a full-scale retrospective as it is a sampler of some of the best efforts from each of the artist's periods...
...Some art historians suggest that this was Matisse's favorite medium, although he was now laboring under circumstances that would have driven lesser beings to despair...
...1 realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something grandiose and pompous...
...These thoughts are occasioned by current retrospectives of two giants of 20th-century art...
...He was acutely concerned that viewers, too, be emotionally and physically involved in his work...
...The exhibition concludes with the large paper cutouts of his last years (1950-54...
...Included are all the Museum's holdings (and promised gifts) of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and cutouts...
...Matisse deserves better...
...The reasons I paint them, however...
...Moreover, it does not do the artist justice to have the intensity of his red, yellow, orange, and purple paintings subdued and intruded upon by the somnolent dark panels to come...
...then it will go on to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston...
...To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass...
...After a series of fauve-oriented landscapes rendered in daubs of bright color, we come upon the highlight of the exhibition...
...is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human...
...I do not mean to suggest that Rothko was a solipsist...
...This consists of the paintings executed between 1907-17, when the artist was considered to be at the heights of his powers...
...Perhaps the cramped and confused atmosphere of this show will speed the expansion and redesign of the moma...
...The early work, for instance, may be awkwardly amusing, blatantly derivative, boring, or just plain mediocre...
...The problem, 1 think, is in the museum...
...Although I cannot relate to such nebulous concepts, it is impossible to deny that we are given a transcendent experience...
...By the time we wade through the "development" and reach the years of prime achievement, we often are suffering from physical, retinal and emotional exhaustion...
...It is a biographical barometer of his emotional state, moving from brilliant, eruptive yellows, oranges, reds, and violets in the heyday of his creative fervor, to somber browns and magentas and finally—in the last pieces before his suicide—to the melancholy, brooding maroons, blood-purple and black...
...Dance (1909...
...the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis...
...Here, too, I think the space is spoiling the show...
...and from there to the Los Angeles County Art Museum...
...When you stand very close you see the stains, the veils and washes of color over color that penetrate the fiber of the canvas...
...Upon entering, we first see a typical studio study of a nude, revealing the Cubist influence of carefully observed MAQUETTE FOR NUIT DE NOEL, 1952 planes...
...Forced to give up painting at his easel because he was confined to bed with a severe intestinal ailment, he took to working with colored paper and scissorsa carry-over from his early Cubist-oriented collages...
...Why, then, does one notice so few viewers at the Guggenheim intensely studying each painting...
...Important as they were to the artist himself, they bear the stamp of all the fads and fashions of the early '40s: Social Realism, Cubism, Surrealism, Myth and Symbolism...
...On the minus side, they can often confuse our senses and dilute our reactions...
...J^RONically, the Guggenheim's flowing line of vision and exalted light would have provided a better setting for the Matisse show than the Museum of Modern Art...
...But it is hard to take the output of this period seriously, for it is highly decorative and has a distinctly Halloween flavor...
...In this mode he designed book jackets, stained glass windows, murals, the Chapel at Vence and liturgical vestments...
...As we contemplate a panel, we are peripherally aware of those to come in the next bay, and the next—and the next...
...This was probably done to preserve the correct chronology, but the juxtaposition destroys the unity of our experience...
...Everything else is cause for admiration and celebration...
...It left no room for accident or indecision and brought him closer to his goal of reducing painting to the essential...
...It grieves me to say this, because the Guggenheim, for me, is one of the loveliest spaces in New York City...
...In Music (1907...
...Islands of color float, vibrate, pulsate, and yet seem magnetically riveted to the canvas, unable to escape its orbit...
...The progression of Rothko's color is particularly poignant...
...you see marvel-ously controlled diffused edges of hovering shapes...
...and there were commissions he did not fill because he disapproved of the space they were to appear in...
...The total of 179 works that are on display here is reputed to be the most important single Matisse collection in either private or public hands...
...Rothko himself was quite concerned about where and how he was shown...
...The other is the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (through January 30...
...However you paint the larger picture, you are in it...
...One room—a separate gallery off the first tiercomes close to providing the proper environment...
...Heavy sculpture and delicate etchings in juxtaposition, airy paintings cheek-by-jowl with dense black sculpture confuse the mood and the imagery...
...These last items are presented in a dramatically darkened room—the climax of the show...
...One frequently hears words like "religious experience," "spiritual" and "metaphysical" bandied about in describing him...
...There is absolutely nothing cool or mechanical in this art...
...His silently throbbing canvases need a quiet, static, confined space to operate against...
...To minimize the unpleasant aspects of the Rothko—the largest, most comprehensive display of his oeuvre ever assembled—I would suggest you get through the early works quickly...
...Yet there also, brilliant paintings inhabit the same space as darker ones...
...The drawings and prints on display at the moma are too rarely available in such numbers, and would make a satisfying exhibit unto themselves...
...It was a domain he shared with Matisse—to whom he readily acknowledged his deep indebtedness in a picture entitled Homage to Matisse...
...It all seems an attempt to throw a grand party with yesterday's leftovers...
...We are aware of a complete physical and emotional involvement—the artist contemplating and feeling his way through to the finish...
...I sometimes wonder why the artist didn't, out of sheer self-respect, set a match to most of it...
...Bather (1909), The Red Studio, The Blue Window, Goldfish and Sculpture (1913...
...Why, then, are people pronouncing this exhibition disappointing as well...
...On the plus side, they provide us the opportunity to scan an artist's entire creative life—to see the initial efforts, the influences, the experiments, the starts in different directions, and finally, the culmination in a mature and personal expressiveness...
...Why is there so much looking across the open arena to the exit...
...Occasionally, he personally supervised the lighting to achieve the appropriate ambience...
...This was his seminal phase, and it influenced artists like Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and hundreds of others in between...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
