No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) (1958)
No. 3/ No. 13 (1949)
No. 10 (1950)
These photographs of paintings by Mark Rothko were taken at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last year. Rothko's magnificent paintings are a favourite, a perennial favourite, with many people including myself. One of the great aesthetic experiences I've had, about twenty-five years ago, was at the Tate Gallery in London, when entering a room filled with (I believe it was nine) enormous Rothko paintings. This is when the aesthetic overlaps with the spiritual.
Claude Monet's "Water Lilies," also at the MOMA, is an equivalent aesthetic experience, but without the experience of the first two decades of the second half of the 20th Century that is found in Rothko's paintings at the Tate Gallery. This particular exhibition of Monet's paintings is an extraordinary lesson in reeducating our way of looking at nature, how light changes what we see, and how emotion is evoked by light.
No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) (1958)
No. 3/ No. 13 (1949)
No. 10 (1950) 
1 comment:
But it is depressing! It is mute. It doesn't say anything, as if it ignored the viewer. That's the trouble with most modern art: so self-centered it ends up painting itself, as if caught in a mirror labyrinth.
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