Last week I published Rothko in Florence - The Liberation of Colour on the Podcast @ A Writer in Italy.
All I can say is, sometimes words cannot tap the experience of the sublime but one can try. Rothko’s work has been personal to me for decades. Two favourites are on permanent exhibition in the Australian National Gallery. I visit them when I need a dose of beauty and colour that goes beyond the mundane world. Rothko’s art takes you there. He said, “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them”.
Rothko’s work was deeply influenced by his journeys to Europe, in particular on his first travels in 1950 with his wife over five months. There were moments in Germany and France, yet when he arrived in Italy something opened in him. He found what he was searching for in Italy.
Every now and then you get to experience something in art that is pure and true, that translates colour and mark making into an emotional lexicon.
He was deeply moved by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Convent of San Marco and by Michelangelo’s architectural vision in the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which would inspire the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s—a dialogue that Rothko further developed during his second visit to Florence in 1966.
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence Italy
Rothko’s art offers up a moment to reconcile what is obvious and move into a direct experience. It is a sense of empathy and awe, and the many contradicting layers within the human condition. That pain, tragedy, indifference, beauty, terror, fragility, sensuality and revelation all exist at any given moment.
“The large paintings envelop the viewer and invite him or her in, it is an invitation to a self contained world where one can lose oneself and perhaps in the process find oneself. And for all their grandest of scale it is an intimate experience, a world unique to that particular encounter” - Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko and the Inner World
Mark Rothko @ Palazzo Strozzi
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