Untitled

1949–1956

Large vertical canvases: being “inside” the picture

For seven years Rothko painted in oil only on large vertical canvases so that the viewer would feel “enveloped within” the painting. Critics saw this as compensating for a lack of substance; he replied that he painted large because he wanted to be intimate, and advised viewers to stand as close as eighteen inches away.

1950s

The poet Stanley Kunitz

The critic Dore Ashton saw Rothko’s acquaintance with the poet Stanley Kunitz as a significant bond of these years, their conversations feeding Rothko’s enterprise; Kunitz saw him as a primitive and a shaman who finds the magic formula.

1954

A Chicago show and a meeting with Sidney Janis

At a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 Rothko met the dealer Sidney Janis, who represented Pollock and Franz Kline; the relationship proved mutually beneficial.

1955

Branded a “sell-out”: the quarrel with Newman and Still

When Fortune magazine named a Rothko painting a good investment in 1955, Newman and Clyfford Still branded him a sell-out with bourgeois aspirations. Still asked for the paintings he had given Rothko over the years to be returned, and Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends’ jealousy.

November 1958

The Pratt Institute talk: a “recipe” for a painting

In November 1958 Rothko spoke at the Pratt Institute, unusually treating art as a trade and listing the ingredients of a painting: a preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit and play, the ephemeral, and ten per cent hope to make the tragic more endurable.