Space, Speculation, and Spirit: Rothko in Florence
A review of Rothko a Firenze considers how Florence shaped Rothko’s art, and what is lost when his paintings are reduced to financial assets.
By Archie Maughan-Taylor
Incandescent orange sits beneath an expansive field of deep scarlet in Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1967), imbuing the work with an incendiary intensity. The piece is emblematic of Rothko’s mature visual language, in which colour and expression were distilled into ordered fields. The artwork’s exceptional candour aside, its pricing reflects a wider trend in which prices for Rothko’s work have risen dramatically. On 16 November, the work on paper will be offered in Sotheby’s New York evening auction, estimated at between $10m and $15m.
Conversely, Rothko a Firenze at the Palazzo Strozzi, which closed roughly three months ago, focused on Rothko’s artistic development and Florence as a source of inspiration. The exhibition was accompanied by satellite displays, placing Rothko’s work in dialogue with Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco, and Michelangelo’s vestibule at the Laurentian Library. The exhibition’s reconsideration of Rothko’s artistic development unfolded alongside renewed market attention, as prices for his work reached new heights. No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) sold for $98.4m, setting an auction record for the artist on May 18. This begs the question as to whether the artworks’ transformation into financial assets obfuscates their transcendent quality.
Nonetheless, the exhibition’s chronological and spatial exposition illuminated the artworks’ significance and established Florence as an integral source of inspiration. The curators Elena Geuna and Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, enabled viewers to trace the painter’s artistic and spiritual development, from his early figurative work through to the pared-back colour fields of his final years. This streamlined approach distinguished the exhibition from less coherent surveys that have served to mystify Abstract Expressionism. For instance, the scale of the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism (2016) caused its focus to shift between themes and individuals. This overpowered the individual specificity of the paintings, consumed as they were in a herculean struggle for attention within a blockbuster exhibition.
The chronological organisation of Rothko a Firenze never strayed from its agenda: to display Florence’s impact on the artist and his own artistic development. Immediately confronted by a room displaying Rothko’s figurative and Neo-Surrealist art, the aptness of chronology becomes apparent. One of Rothko’s early figurative works, Interior (1936), depicts three ambiguous figures loitering in a murky doorway, overshadowed by a mass of deep reds covering the upper wall, crowding out the negative space, indicating Rothko’s precocious understanding of the emotion evoked by fields of colour. His Neo-Surrealist pieces led to his Multiforms, which ceded to his later colour fields. His Multiforms (1946-49) consist of porous and amorphous shapes of colour that anticipate his more structured compositions. In this way, they expose a nascent awareness that composition and intuitive application of colour might convey and elicit profound human emotions.
Further on, Untitled (1952-53) illustrates this capacity; horizontal bands of chartreuse, yellow, and cadmium red construct a composition that merely seems to imitate a naïve sketch of a sunset. That I derived such tranquillity from a narrow colour palette displays the gravity of Rothko’s paintings, since this response was a far cry from the ‘tragedy, ecstasy, doom’ he sought to convey. The curation’s orderliness connected each room to a distinct phase in Rothko’s life. The chronology meant that the works kept their exceptional singularity, whilst also being aligned with the maturation of Rothko’s painterly language.
While the chronological arrangement of the exhibition risked narration rather than incision, the works were tied to the city as they displayed Rothko’s desire to create a sense of space through his paintings. Through visits to the frescoes of Fra Angelico at San Marco and Michelangelo’s vestibule at the Laurentian Library, Rothko formed a belief that art might interact with the architecture of the room itself. Florence and the villas of Pompeii reinforced Rothko’s understanding that colour and form produced a sense of space that could advance the artworks beyond objects of observation. The influence of Florence is most evident in his Seagram Murals (1958-59), commissioned for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York; the sobering colour palette of these paintings led the artist to claim that he had made ‘a place.’ In the exhibition catalogue, his son credits them with becoming ‘part of the walls themselves, demanding not so much our attention as our semi-conscious awareness of their incessant pulsation.’ Florence remained an enduring influence on the artist, evident in the Black and Gray paintings (1969), the asphaltic greys and blacks of which achieve the same stark sensation derived from the oppressive architecture of Michelangelo’s vestibule.
In the final room of the exhibition, Rothko’s work was presented in a dimly lit octagonal space, akin to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, his final commission. Placed within the Strozzi’s rendition of the chapel, Untitled (1969) hints at the culmination of Rothko’s artistic and spiritual development.
Pastel blue on wove paper forms the bulk of the work, yet its surface occasionally gives way to subtle mauves underneath. This block is sandwiched between a streak of white coarsely muddled with the blue and a thin line of white at the top, granting the artwork a reductive simplicity that highlights his evolution. The interplay between these works, with their muted tones and simplified compositions, and the dim lighting of the final room brought about an intimate directness that immersed the spectator in a quasi-spiritual space.
Although their extraordinary prices increasingly present Rothko’s works as financial assets, Rothko a Firenze shed renewed light on their artistic value. This perspective is central because commodification deprives artwork of the myriad roles and environments intended by the artist, degrading the works to monetised goods exchanged amongst collectors. Notably, Rothko withdrew the Seagram murals because his paintings were not intended as decoration. The Strozzi’s ordered rooms and its dialogue with the architecture of Florence situated a selection of his works within a formative cultural milieu and the apt environments in which their spiritual essence might flourish.
