The Impact of Mark Rothko's Later Works on the Work of Helen Frankenthaler and Hiroshi Sugimoto

THE IMPACT OF MARK ROTHKO’S LATER WORK ON THE WORKS OF HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Nicholas Candela Contemporary Art History 701-Online November 20, 2014

2 Mark Rothko had been painting for well over twenty-five years before he arrived at his now-iconic rectangular color-field compositions. Once identified as an “aesthetic rebel,”1 Rothko and his subsequent paintings became a beacon for an artistic transformation and provided a new direction for Abstract Expressionism. His paintings also influenced the Color Field painters, and merge the values of Modernism with the Romantic notion of the sublime. Dore Ashton, a close friend and art critic had written, “Rothko in the 1950s was prepared to go beyond symbolism to sense the silences behind and beneath his every gesture on the canvas. The forms in his paintings would still be like “actors”, but now they acted in a different drama in which anecdote disappears into light.”2 The plastic spaces of Mark Rothko’s work from the late 1940s on had an immediate impact on his contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, and have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose black and white images of lakes, oceans, and seas rival the sublime spaces of Rothko.

Much of the work for which Rothko is most widely known is based on the rigid and systematic investigation and de-construction of composition and color, and little more. Indeed, these later works appear to have adhered to many of the basic tenets of Modernism, lacking representation and seemingly devoid of any human element, invoking the requisite individual aesthetic experience of the viewer.

In fact, it was this systematic exploration that eventually became the context for Rothko’s work, with repetition and variety ultimately reflecting Rothko’s own obsession with an infinite and plastic space as he sought time and again to prove the existential worth of his visually1

Glen Phillips and Thomas Crow, Seeing Rothko, (Los Angeles: Getty Pub., 2005), 16.

2Dore Ashton,

About Rothko, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2003), 123.

3 commanding paintings. He often identified Aeschylus and Shakespeare, the great tragedians, as influential in his own artistic development and at one point he even stated that “A painting is not about experience, it is an experience.”3 However, where most Modernists purposefully avoided any connotations of the spiritual, Rothko pursued them. Therefore it should be noted that while his contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning were reading and reflecting on the likes of Carl Jung and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rothko was not influenced by them, instead pre-occupying himself with the works of the famed (albeit opposing) existentialists, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

Rothko had been working with variations of his now-famous rectangular color-field compositions for more than fifteen years when he accepted, in 1958, an invitation to create a series of paintings for a secluded dining room adjacent to The Four Seasons Restaurant inside the Seagram Building in New York City. Initially Rothko embraced the project wholeheartedly, even renting and modifying a new studio, a former YMCA basketball court, to mimic the interior of the restaurant. However, several nuances of the restaurant space seemed to have escaped Rothko in his planning, namely that the dining room was bordered on two sides by a large window and a series of doors that opened into the larger restaurant. Having only a small row of windows near the top of his 23 foot-tall studio space, Rothko, in his subsequent paintings, responded to this enclosed, dark space rather than the open and lively atmosphere in which they were meant to hang.4 This is not to say that the paintings were unsuccessful. As the German art historian and critic Werner Haftmann commented when seeing the works in progress in Rothko’s studio space, “…soon, we were encompassed by these darkening walls of light. It was a very spiritual 3 Ashton, 4

About Rothko, 135.

Borchardt-Hume, Rothko, 18. This phrase and the preceding two correspond to the author’s description of Rothko’s new studio space, purchased exclusively for Seagram Commission.

4 luminosity that emanated from these backgrounds.” 5 From the beginning, Rothko’s new work had such presence and conviction that it quickly became the very experience Rothko sought.

When we study one of Rothko’s earlier works from the series, such as No. 9 from 1958 (Fig. 1), we can see some of what Haftmann was referring to. First and foremost, at nearly nine feet tall and over thirteen feet wide, the massive canvas asserts itself to the viewer; there are no casual glances to be had. The vast horizontal orientation of the canvas is reinforced by three bands of color that seem to emanate from the canvas fibers themselves, stretching across nearly the entire format. Varying hues of red simultaneously collect and disperse, unifying the entire surface of the painting, with the highest intensity of these occurring through the center, forcing itself outward, imposing itself on the viewer. Meanwhile the black and white bands serve to stabilize the field of red, but the white rectangle also generates, even radiates light while the black shape slowly undulates forward and backward, aiding in the creation of an endless and indeterminate space that envelopes and offers viewers an utterly existential experience.

Despite the presence of paintings such as No. 9, Rothko soon realized that he could strengthen his work even further by balancing the horizontal nature of his bands of color with a more vertical format, or at the very least by altering the manner in which a border is employed.

For example, in a painting from 1959, Mural for End Wall (Fig. 2), Rothko uses a frame of a fiery red hue, inset within a field of a rich plum tone to create an interior vertical rectangle.

Again an exceptionally large painting at nearly nine feet square, the visual impact of Rothko’s simple expression is unmatched. By allowing the framing device to be wider on the sides and

5

Borchardt-Hume, Rothko, 19.

5 narrower on the top and bottom, Rothko manipulates what is essentially a square format to create the illusion of overall verticality. Additionally, the softer plum color that exists both at the edges of the canvas and inside the central rectangle seems to be holding back, suppressing even the light that emanates through the blaring red tone (notably painted on top of the plum hue) of the frame. Finally, Rothko offers the viewer small glimpses of his underpainting, a significantly cooler blue-violet that not only grounds the viewer’s gaze, but reinforces the notion that light is squeezing out from a much deeper space that exists well beneath the calm of the plum-colored shapes.

As his work continued to mature and evolve through the 1960s and into the 1970s, it remained evident that the forms Mark Rothko employed in his paintings were actors, fulfilling the roles his own memories and experiences had initiated for him. Through the diffuse boundaries and thin, ghost-like presences on his surfaces, they confront viewers. These surfaces that simultaneously withhold and dispense light create endless spaces6, imbued with the viewer’s own experiences and visible only through Rothko’s distillation of shape and color.

While Rothko was in the midst of his exploration of color-fields and rectangular composition, Helen Frankenthaler was launching her own career. A student of the critic Clement Greenberg, Frankenthaler, along with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland, were pioneering what soon became known as the “soak-stain” technique7 in which diluted oil paint was poured onto a canvas, soaking into the surface, highlighting the weave of the fabric, and even leaving a glowing edge around the pigment. To Greenberg this technique was the ultimate 6

Bonnie Clearwater, The Rothko Book, (London: Tate Pub., 2006), 137.

7

John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, (New York: Abrams Pub., Inc. 1989), 69-70.

6 synthesis of figure and ground, perfectly exemplifying Modernism’s overarching belief that form is content enough. As he noted, “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like dyed cloth: the threadness and the wovenness are in the color.”8 The soak-stain technique and subsequent lack of a textural change in surface between colors (even between painted and unpainted areas) created an consistent unity that did not necessitate an uninterrupted composition. Frankenthaler’s initial synthesis of this technique and composition can be observed in her 1952 painting, Mountains and Sea (Fig 3). In it, gestural lines and shapes drawn in charcoal provide a very loose framework over which Frankenthaler poured her paint. Transparent shapes of warm reds and yellows spring from cooler blues and greens, evoking the depth of a landscape without the representation. It is precisely this transparency of pigment in addition to the warm and cool juxtapositions that open the space before the viewer. Just as the warm center of the painting progresses into cooler shapes, those same blues and greens progress again into the warm tone of bare canvas, creating a tangible, malleable depth in the painting that belies the flatness that typically accompanies a two dimensional image as it approaches its surface’s edges. These transitions between various transparent hues and eventually into the naked surface of the canvas itself serve to create a dynamic and spiraling space, alive and breathing, all made possible by Frankenthaler’s staining technique.

8

Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 70.

7 While Moutains and Sea lacked the all-over surface that Rothko employed in paintings, and gave an obvious (albeit abstract) nod to landscape, its format and the manner in which the image lay suspended between unfinished edges bears similarities to Rothko’s work of the same period. For example, the low definition edges of No. 9 as well as its hue and value contrasts offer to the viewer the idea that its space is limitless; it continues on even outside the edges of the canvas. Similarly, Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea extends radial from the center of the canvas, barely touching the edges in a few spots, but nonetheless implying that, given a larger format, the space would continue on and on.

As Frankenhaler’s work evolved into the early 1960s, she continued to work with the staining technique, experimenting with both oil and acrylic washes to achieve her desired effects using the entire canvas as a receptor for color. As her interest in and use of acrylic paint grew, her colors became more saturated and more dense in their application, even including the use of cool dark browns and blacks. Though not specifically regarded among the Color Field painters, her compositions, which had become decidedly less drawn and gestural than that of Mountains and Sea, reflected a growing interest in a somewhat monolithic framework, even going so far as to fit shapes inside shapes. This is not at all dissimilar to Rothko’s rectangular bands of color, and the square-inside-a-square compositions of the Seagram series. For example, in her 1964 painting Buddha’s Court (Fig. 4), a framework of low-saturation green and orange squares contains cooler shapes of blues, violets, and grays, all of which are balanced by a single fiery red stroke toward the bottom. This confident and evocative composition conjures little of the

8 appearance but all of the force of nature as the colors smolder next to one another.9 Frankenthaler’s pouring technique applied to the interior shapes of color still allows the viewer glimpses of the bare canvas. This is reminiscent of the manner in which Rothko allowed light to radiate from behind and even within shapes of color.

Just as Rothko’s uneven surfaces throbbed between the viewer and some unknown depth, Frankenthaler’s uneven applications of poured paint create similarly pulsating images. Mottled shapes of puddled color create illusionistic spaces while simultaneously differentiating her from her closest contemporaries such as Noland. In Buddha’s Court, each individual shape of color shows some variation in its surface, but nowhere is this variation more obvious than in the three shapes of blue. The outer limits of these shapes seem to rise toward the viewer, dissolving just below the picture plane while the interior of these shapes exist in rich, dense hues that suggest almost unfathomable depths. Though Frankenthaler stated, “My conscious interest was more in drawing and the drawing of color than in color alone,” she also admitted to a desire to create spaces that stretched edge to edge, confronted viewers at the surface, “and yet travel miles in space.”10 In fact, to Frankenthaler, color and space were inseparable, and any attempt to use color without acknowledging its capacity to move through space rendered it little more than a decorative element.

Rothko’s influences can continue to be seen well into more recent contemporary art, and in a variety of mediums as well, such as the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese-American

9

Lance Esplund, “Artistic Legacy; Frankenthaler is Recalled for Merging Genres,” Buffalo News, 30 December 2011, 9.

10

Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 184.

9 photographer. While explaining one of his earlier series of photographs of fossilized trilobites, Hiroshi Sugimoto referred to the objects as “…pre-photography, a fossilization of time.”11 It is precisely this sentiment that has not only guided Sugimoto’s work over the past twenty years, but links a more recent series of seascapes to Rothko’s later works. His seascape photographs, shot during various times of both day and night, look like Rothko’s paintings. Especially those images in which the horizon line is imperceptible, masked behind a perfectly even gradient of whites and grays, Sugimoto is giving the viewer a glimpse into a plastic void, just as Rothko did.

Additionally, though these are technically representational images, Sugimoto’s decision to focus directly on the intersection of water and air, and his purposeful blurring and masking of that divide strips the landscape of its most recognizable element: a horizon line. Instead Sugimoto has created an undefinable edge between tangible and intangible elements, questioning where one stops and the other begins, and in so doing so, raising the viewer’s awareness to similarly existential ideas over which Rothko constantly obsessed.

The variety of edge and contrast of value in Sugimoto’s seascape photographs echoes Rothko’s use of color and value within his rectangular formats to create active spaces that push and pull the viewer. For example, in the piece titled Ligurian Sea, Near Saviore (Fig. 5), there is a horizontal band of intense white that just barely extends from edge to edge, bulging in the middle and pulsating as though the light just beneath the surface is alive itself, struggling to squeeze through. The viewer can see a similar effect in Rothko’s Mural For End Wall, as his fiery red strains to break from the lower-intensity plum-colored ground. This work, as well as others by Sugimoto, establish an aura of the sublime. He has captured in one moment a perfect 11

Shattuck, Kathryn. “A Minimalist Adrift in a Sea of Acclaim.” New York Times, September 22, 2005, 1.

10 combination of history and present experience, instantly instilling simultaneously in the viewer a memory and a new sight to behold.

Still, perhaps one of the most interesting features of Sugimoto’s work is his inclusion and exclusion of the surface texture of the water. Though these photos are technically representational, Sugimoto’s decision to include or exclude the surface texture of the water, as in Ligurian Sea or North Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 6) respectively, is reminiscent of Rothko’s own struggle with the presence of an “artist’s hand.” While the ethos of Modernism stipulated an authentic surface devoid of external influence, Rothko did allow the occasional paint drip to remain in place, or an errant brushstroke as one color dissolved into the next, as can be seen along the border of the high-intensity red in Mural for the End Wall. In a similar way, Sugimoto’s choice to leave evidence of a recognizable subject alludes to his desire to explore these spaces in a more ontological manner. Where Rothko may have felt more bound by the doctrines of Modernism, leading him to sneak in an expressive mark here or there, perhaps in a subtly subversive act, Sugimoto faces no such limitations and opts instead for a quiet yet unmistakable mark to indicate his human presence in the image.

As early as the Seagram Murals, the malleable atmospheres of Mark Rothko’s later work, as he continued exploring color, shape and format, had a noticeable influence on his contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, and have continued to inform the work of artists like photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to this day. His reliance on the tenets of Modernism coupled with an intrinsic desire to create paintings that were transcendent experiences made Rothko a exemplar for the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters.

11 Rothko’s paintings move the viewer toward a transformative experience. His spaces are no illusion, for a point of origin or ending is completely missing, they simply exist. Each painting is a brand new, plastic environment, moving within itself and shifting towards and away from the viewer all at once. Subsequently, the work of Helen Frankenthaler, whose transparent stains further reduced the separation between form and content, evolved to include surfaces that were entirely covered with similar amorphous shapes of color. Her large-scale paintings and their extension of hue to the very edge of the canvas, as well as her investigation of concentric shapes were also aligned with Rothko’s efforts to build completely new plastic environments which shifted and slid at the aesthetic discretion of the individual viewer. A further application of these trans-figured spaces can be seen in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of water, air, and their natural horizon lines. An imperceptible transition from top to bottom allude to a space between man and God, a nod toward Rothko’s own consistent themes of transcendence, and an extension of his investigation into our very existence.

12

Bibliography

Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Clearwater, Bonnie. The Rothko Book. London: Tate; 2006.

Phillips, Glenn. Seeing Rothko. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005.

Rothko, Mark, and Achim Hume. Rothko: The Late Series. London: Tate Pub., 2008.

Shattuck, Kathryn. A Minimalist Adrift in a Sea of Acclaim. New York Times, September 22, 2005, http://0-www.lexisnexis.com.library.scad.edu.

Splund, Lance. Artistic legacy. Buffalo News, December 30, 2011, http://mu5em8zh4m.search.serialssolutions.com.

13

Fig. 1: No. 9 (White and Black on Wine), Mark Rothko, oil on canvas, 105” by 166”, 1958.

14

Fig. 2: Untitled, (Mural for End Wall), Mark Rothko, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 265” x 288”, 1959, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

15

Fig. 3: Mountains and Sea, Helen Frankenthaler, Oil on Canvas, 7’-2 5/8” 9’-9 1/4”, 1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

16

Fig. 4: Buddha’s Court, Helen Frankenthaler, Acrylic on Canvas, 94” x 98”, 1964.

17

Fig. 5: Ligerian Sea, Near Saviore, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Silver Gelatin Print, 1993.

18

Fig. 6: North Atlantic Sea, Cape Breton, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Silver Gelatin Print, 1996.