View allAll Photos Tagged ROTHKO
7 of 10, oh, my, she almost hit my camera...
Mark Rothko American, born Russia ( now Latvia). 1903 - 1970
No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) 1958
Oil on canvas
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1959
In 1943, Rothko, with his friend the painter Adolph Gottlieb, wrote several philosophical statements that would continue to guide his painting for years to come: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” The scale and surface of this painting reflect these ideas. Rothko abandoned traditional Renaissance three-point perspective, which conceives of the canvas as a window onto another world. Multiple glazes of dark pigments of varying opacity result in a picture surface that seems flat yet quivers and vibrates, offering a sense of atmospheric depth. Rothko hoped that these compositional strategies would invite visual and emotional contemplation, creating the conditions for silence and reflection.
From the Placard: MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Lev Manovich, 2010.
images preparation: Xiaoda Wang
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Data:
128 paintings by Piet Mondrian (1905 - 1917).
151 paintings by Mark Rothko (1944 - 1957).
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Mapping:
X-axis: brightness mean
Y-axis: saturation mean
The two image plots are placed side by side so they share the Y-axis
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This visualization demonstrates how image plots can be used to compare multiple data sets. In this case, the goal is to compare similar number of paintings by Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko (produced over comparable time periods of 13 years) along particular visual dimensions.
We have selected particular periods in the career of each artist which are structurally similar. In the beginning of a period each artist was imitating his predecessors and contemporaries. By the end period each developed his mature style for which he became famous. In between, each gradually moved moved from figurative representation to pure abstraction.
The left image plot shows 128 paintings by Mondrian; the right shows 151 paintings by Rothko. The paintings are organized according to their brightness mean (X-axis) and saturation mean (Y-axis). These measurements were obtained with digital image processing software.
Projecting sets of paintings of these two artists into the same coordinate space reveals their comparative "footprints" - the parts of the space of visual possibilities they explored. We can see the relative distributions of their works - the more dense and the more sparse areas, the presence or absence of clusters, the outliers, etc.
The visualizations also show how Mark Rotho - the abstract artist of the generation which followed Mondrian’s - was exploring the parts of brightness/hue space which Mondrian did not reach (highly saturated and bright paintings in the upper right corner, and desaturated dark paintings in the left part).
Another interesting pattern revealed by the visualization is that all paintings of one artists are sufficiently different from each other – no two occupy the same point in brightness / saturation space. This makes sense given the ideology of modern art on unique original works – if we are to map works from earlier centuries, when it was common for artists to make copies of successful works which were considered to be equally valuable, we may expect to see a different pattern. However what could not be predicted is that the distances between any two paintings which are next to each are similar to each other – i.e., while each image occupies its own unique position, its not very far from its neighbours.
To see how each artist moved through brightness/saturation space during the 13 year periods we are comparing, we can visualize the paintings as color circles. The colors indicate the position of each paintings within the time period, running from blue to red. To make the patterns even easier to see, we also vary the size of circles from - from smallest to largest.
www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4728910768/in/set-721576...
This visualizationreveals another interesting pattern. Rothko starts his explorations in late 1930-1940s in the same same part of brightness/saturation space where Mondrian arrives by 1917 - high brightness/low saturation area (the right bottom corner of the plot). But as he develops, he is able to move beyond the areas already “marked” by his European predecessors such as Mondrian.
Mark Rothko. No. 5/No. 22. 1950. Óleo sobre lienzo. 297 x 272 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Nueva York (EUA)1108.1969
Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz)
American, born Russia (Latvia), 1903–1970
Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953
Oil on canvas
197.5 x 207.7 cm (77 3/4 x 81 3/4 in.)
ktpillar's brother, Chad, was in town this past week and we decided to go to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Rothko Chapel. I had been before to both, but never equipped with my camera.
You're not allowed to take photos in the chapel but I was able to sneak one. Chad mentioned that it would be a good place to get married. I think he is right when I make an honest woman out of Katie.
Huile sur toile, 297 x 272 cm, 1950, Moma, New York.
Les rectangles de ce tableau ne s'étendent pas jusqu'aux bords de la toile et semblent flotter juste au-dessus de sa surface. L'augmentation de cette sensation est l'effet de l'image rémanente chromatique. Regarder chaque segment coloré individuellement affecte la perception de ceux qui lui sont adjacents. Le centre rouge-orange du tableau teinte le jaune au-dessus avec juste un peu de vert. Le jaune ci-dessus semble teinter l'orange de bleu. Malgré ces relations chromatiques, Rothko ne voulait pas que ses images soient appréciées uniquement pour leurs qualités spectrales. Il a déclaré : "Si vous n'êtes ému que par les relations entre les couleurs, alors vous passez à côté de l'essentiel. Ce qui m'intéresse, c'est d'exprimer les grandes émotions : la tragédie, l'extase, le malheur." (cf. Moma).