| Artist: | Rothko, Mark |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX | |
| Date: | 1965-1966 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | post WWII, NY School | |
| Movement: | Color Field | |
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: a picture without a specific subject, but not without content; suggestion of transcendent light, inner illumination, but going dark; a metaphysical longing to transcend the physicalworld of matter; to go beyond the finite to the infinite; the "Sublime," the aura. Style: stacked color blocks with frayed edges set floating against a veiled color field; a "soft" geometry without any hard edges; does away with line; the color blocks expand across the field almost to thecanvas edge; wholistic; the colors look almost breathed on; not about individual gesture; more about color and light. Context: late Rothko, when the colors and light start to go dark and more tragic; post-war existentialism (alienation in the void; death as what makes life meaningful); more than mereformalism; color and light as the expressive vehicles of feeling and epiphany; abstraction as a search for essence and the "Sublime" (the boundless, the infinite). | ||
