‘‘Pretty.’ ’Beautiful.’ ’Nice.’ ’Fine.’ That’s our life now! Everything’s ‘fine’. He rages against the triviality of modern life. Rothko’s frustration with Pop Art extends to the culture that has created and celebrated it. Completely temporal, completely disposable, like Kleenex.’ ‘You know the problem with those painters? It’s exactly what you said: they are painting for this moment, right now. Sometimes you just want a fucking still life or soup can or comic book!’ Not everyone wants art that actually hurts. Not every painting needs to rip your guts out and expose your soul. ‘Not everything needs to be so goddamn important all the time. Rothko’s assistant, however, is a fan of the emergent Pop Art movement of artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Nobody can paint a cubist picture now…The child must banish the father. ‘We destroyed Cubism, de Kooning and me and Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others. Rothko explains to his young assistant that he and his fellow Abstract Expressionists achieved their dominance of the post-war art scene by sweeping aside the previous generation. We all had one thing in common…We understood the importance of seriousness.’ ‘People like me… My contemporaries, my colleagues…Those painters who came up with me. He approaches his craft with high seriousness. His luminous paintings pulse with introspection, intensity and intellectual energy. Rothko strives to convey raw truth, real feeling and pure thought - in maroon, dark red and black. In his paint-splattered Bowery studio he creates his work surrounded by whisky bottles, canvases, turpentine and brushes in low light to the sounds of Schubert and Mozart. Mark Rothko has been commissioned to paint a series of murals for the glamorous Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. There’s a splendid production of the 2009 play ‘Red’ by John Logan running at the Wyndham Theatre in London (until 28 July). The second we’re born we squall, we writhe, we squirm.
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