Mark Rothko and the Spirituality in Art
ART9-5a-Mon2
Robert Solomon
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
September 9 - October 7
Mark Rothko’s paintings are known to elicit a powerful emotional response unique to each viewer. Appropriately named the “Rothko Effect,” this phenomenon relies on the viewer’s commitment to an uninterrupted, uninhibited personal relationship with a Rothko painting. While the viewer embodies the flow of Rothko’s language of tragedy, ecstasy, and doom, their unconscious releases personal history into the mix. The resulting mashup takes the form of spirituality.
In this class we’ll first examine both written and visual influences on Mark Rothko’s thought process that would eventually lead him to the floating color fields in the late 1940s. Next, we’ll explore the “Rothko Effect'' and discuss spirituality. Here we’ll look at the Rothko Chapel, noting the founders John and Dominique de Menil, and the influence of Father Marie-Alain Couturier. Without the benefit of a Rothko here in class, relying instead on a memory of a Rothko where we may have retained that feeling of spirituality, can we now more easily recognize the spirituality in work that preceded Rothko? We’ll view slides of paintings by Théodore Géricault, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, J.M.W. Turner, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky. Viewing these paintings while listening to the music of György Ligeti, Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Jean Sibelius, will inspire us to hold uninhibited dialogue about Mark Rothko’s opus.
Please note that our fourth class will be a visit to the MFA to view and discuss JMW Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying, typhoon coming on).
Roughly the same amount of lecture and discussion.
Required: Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky (approx. $8.00 Amazon), The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche (from $5.39 Amazon), Leap of Faith – how Mark Rothko reimagined religious art for the modern age, Aaron Rosen (Apollo Magazine, August 29, 2020) (supplied by instructor). Also suggested but not required (these may be available at your local library): Writings on Art, Mark Rothko (from $22.00 Amazon) Mark Rothko: from the inside out, Christopher Rothko ($27.00 Amazon) The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art; Mark Rothko ($17.48 Amazon).
30 mins - 1 hour/week.
Robert Solomon is an independent art historian specializing in mid-twentieth century American art, specifically, the New York School. He is the right holder to the Joseph F. Stapleton Drawing Collection which currently donates the artist’s work to university-based art museums. He studied with Stapleton (1921-1994) at Pratt in the early 1970s and was mentored by the artist into the mid-1980s. Stapleton was one of the 400 or so younger generation of artists who, after serving in WWII, returned to NYC to study and launch their careers. Solomon, who holds a BFA from Pratt and an MFA from Tufts, is presently writing Joseph Stapleton’s authorized biography.