Twenty-two years after the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Fondation Louis Vuitton once again offers us the pleasure of plunging into the hypnotic colour fields of painter Mark Rothko, the great master of the colour field 1.
“How can one express what cannot be expressed and yet is so intensely experienced? How can we introduce words to a work that has brought pictoriality to its incandescence […] What is the visitor looking for, captive to what speaks so loudly to his eyes, to his heart, to his whole being? What is the artist himself looking for? Rare photos show him in his studio, tirelessly scanning the fields of colour to which he has gradually reduced his own canvases? Why, even today, does this work seem so necessary to us, in its timeless urgency to evoke the human condition, this poignancy 2 lurking in the depths of each of us, as Rothko wants it to be at the heart of his work?” asks Suzanne Pagé 3, curator of the exhibition, in the preface to the catalogue. Indeed, it’s hard to describe the emotion that overwhelms us at the sight of one of the abstract canvases by the American painter who conceived his works “as spectacles” but also as “transcendental experiences “2.
“ABSTRACT ICONS “
Far from action painting, his abstract work, which developed in the late 1940s after figurative beginnings inspired by Expressionism and then Surrealism, is the result of a slow, meditative process that encourages contemplation, even meditation. His floating spaces are reduced to two or three rectangles with diffuse, blurred contours, velvety materials and luminous colours. Rigorously flat, entirely devoted to colour, the space is nonetheless a creator of multiple depths derived from imperceptible chromatic variations. Blues, yellows, reds, greens and, at the end of his life, blacks and grays, like the golden backgrounds of icons, are suspended, as if evaporating or dissolving in their own light. And the fascination continues…
France – Paris
Literally meaning “coloured field”, this term was used in 1962 by critic Clément Greenberg to designate the painting of artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clifford Still, who emerged from Abstract Expressionism and inherited Matisse’s concept of colour as an autonomous object in itself, not subject to form or to any narrative or illustration.
Quotes from the artist himself.
Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, had already curated the exhibition at the MAM (of which she was then Director) in 1999.
“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.”
Mark Rothko
The Romantics were prompted, essai de Mark Rothko, 1947/48 ; cité dans Possibilities, vol 1, no 1, hiver 1947-48, Kate Rothko Prizel et Christophor Rothko.
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8, avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Paris 16e
From 18 October 2023 to 2 April 2024.