Bathers or Beach Scene, Mark Rothko

“ROTHKO’s skill in rendering the human form was poor, which is evident in early works like Bathers or Beach Scene (Untitled) (1933/4). [Author Simon] Schama admits as much, noting that: “When he [Rothko] stood in the Brooklyn [Jewish Center] classroom [where he taught art classes from 1929–46] it all seemed so easy. He would tell the children not to mind the rules — painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music but when he tried it came out as a croak. It’s the work of a painfully knotted imagination. No not very good.”According to the general consensus, Rothko “never stood out as a great draughtsman and could even at times appear clumsy in the execution of his oil paintings.”

“Rothko, in a speech in the mid-thirties, offered a quasi-philosophical rationale for the unimportance of technical skill, stressing “the difference between sheer skill, and skill that is linked to spirit, expressiveness and personality.” He insisted that artistic expression was “unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity, simplicity and directness of children.” Such grandiloquent pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Collings noting that “Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art.”

“This tendency on his part prompted one writer to declare: “What I find amazing … is how a painting which is two rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and social construction.” He suggests a good rule of thumb is “the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a work, the less worth the painting has.  By this definition Rothko may be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity.”

— Brenton Sanderson, “Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art,” 2020

— Comments —

Kathy G. writes:

Modern Art” is a huge hoax. That it has been foisted on the culture by people trusted to be experts and knowledgeable is beginning to be understood by the millions who looked at it, and said, “OK, if you say so”, when being instructed by their “betters” in deliberately abstract explanations and sophistries. Ugliness as art, ugliness as the new standard of “beauty”, language and behavior is all around us, and it is dreadful. Up is down.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

Great article on Rothko. I think he is the greater deceiver, more than Pollock or Picasso. I think also he HAS skill.

He seems to be really good at layering paint. If you’ve ever worked with paint (especially watercolor), there is a magical moment when two colors are layerd, and a third is formed (red and yellow make orange, for example). But there is also that shimmering red…orange seperate entity that forms, until you plunge in and mix the thing! It is the same with silk cloth, where there is a strange shimmer of two colors in some kinds of silk, where looking one way gives you one color and the other way another, and somewhere in the middle, a combination of the two.

I WAS duped by Rothko, but I think rightly so – LOL. But I was also aware of the hoax. I was NEVER duped by Picasso, for example, who became the modern art god with his incredibly clumsy drawings. He found a way to dupe also, but his method has been written about (although much less than it should be), and it is less forceful than Rothko’s.

I also love color, so Rothko’s colors pulled me in (so to speak!). I think his skill IS his color manipulation.

I departed from modernism, abstraction, and modern/postmodern art a long time ago. Now I’m just intrigued with what they’re up to, and mostly I laugh.

But, we must never forget that these people are dead serious, and the giants are (obviously) very intelligent. In the end, I think they ARE looking for something, something that they cannot, and will not, find in their (in our) world.

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