I'd like to hear Ber talk about Rothko.
Has anyone heard the Dar Wiliams song about Rothko? I'll try to get the lyrics and post them here. It gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. (Record belongs to my daughter so I hardly ever get to hear it.)
Jn
"The blue it speaks so full"
"The blue it speaks so full"
Last edited by Jnyusa on Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
Here they are:
The blue it speaks so full
It's like the beauty one can barely stand
Or too much things dropped in your hand
And there's a green like the peace
In your heart sometimes
Painted underneath the sheets of ashy snow
And there's a blue like where the urban angels go, very bright
Now the Calder mobile tips a biomorphic sphere
Then it swings its dangling pieces
round to other paintings here
Your behavior is so male
It's like you can't explain yourself to me
I think I'll ask Renoir to tea
For his flowers are as real as they are all the time
And the sunlight sets the furniture aglow
It's a pleasant time as far as people go, how far do they go?
Well his roses are perfect and his words have no wings
I know what he can give me and I like to know these things
I met her at the funeral
She said I don't know what he meant to me
I just know he affected me
An effect not unlike his art,
I believe
The service starts and we are in the know
He had so much to say but more to show, and ain't that true of life?
So we weep for a person who lived at great cost
Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed that we had lost
A friend and I in a museum room
She says, "Look at Mark Rothko's side
Did you know about his suicide?
Some folks were born with a foot in the grave, but not me, of course"
And she smiles as if to say we're in the know
Then she names a coffee place where we can go, uptown
Now the painting is desperate, but the crowds wash away
In a world of kind pedestrians who've seen enough today
Dar Williams
(haunting melody, too, with a sort of angel chorus ooo-ing during the bridges)
The blue it speaks so full
It's like the beauty one can barely stand
Or too much things dropped in your hand
And there's a green like the peace
In your heart sometimes
Painted underneath the sheets of ashy snow
And there's a blue like where the urban angels go, very bright
Now the Calder mobile tips a biomorphic sphere
Then it swings its dangling pieces
round to other paintings here
Your behavior is so male
It's like you can't explain yourself to me
I think I'll ask Renoir to tea
For his flowers are as real as they are all the time
And the sunlight sets the furniture aglow
It's a pleasant time as far as people go, how far do they go?
Well his roses are perfect and his words have no wings
I know what he can give me and I like to know these things
I met her at the funeral
She said I don't know what he meant to me
I just know he affected me
An effect not unlike his art,
I believe
The service starts and we are in the know
He had so much to say but more to show, and ain't that true of life?
So we weep for a person who lived at great cost
Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed that we had lost
A friend and I in a museum room
She says, "Look at Mark Rothko's side
Did you know about his suicide?
Some folks were born with a foot in the grave, but not me, of course"
And she smiles as if to say we're in the know
Then she names a coffee place where we can go, uptown
Now the painting is desperate, but the crowds wash away
In a world of kind pedestrians who've seen enough today
Dar Williams
(haunting melody, too, with a sort of angel chorus ooo-ing during the bridges)
Last edited by Jnyusa on Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
(Hey! So this is where those posts went? 
)
I don't know the song, Jny, but the lyrics read as poetry.
I know very little about Rothko. Only that he liked to paint vast canvases, in what look like very restricted colours but, on closer inspection, turn out to be many variations on one or two hues, playing with the saturation and brightness levels up and down the scale. Looking at those paintings for a while, you get lost; the blurred edges seem to disappear, or merge with the edge of your vision, until you are floating above the painting and it envelops you. And then you start to see subtle changes, here and there, which conspire to suggest ghostly images in your mind, lines, planes. The transition between bands of colour suddenly turn into horizons, the band themselves become landscapes, if one is so inclined as to see them.
The Tate Modern gallery in London has a room devoted to Rothko, the nine Seagram murals. It was my first encounter with the works, rather than reproductions in books. It's true of all works of art, that one should always try to see them in the flesh (so to speak); no reproduction can ever make them justice, in all their dimensions. These particular works are quite dark and somber (probably from his latter period), and you want to sit in quiet there, as in a place of worship. They're quite amazing. If anyone has a Rothko in a museum or gallery nearby, I thoroughly recommend going to see it, and sitting or standing in front of the work for a while, and looking beyond the label on the wall, just letting the fields of colour saturate your vision.
(edited to fix a smiley code)
)I don't know the song, Jny, but the lyrics read as poetry.
I know very little about Rothko. Only that he liked to paint vast canvases, in what look like very restricted colours but, on closer inspection, turn out to be many variations on one or two hues, playing with the saturation and brightness levels up and down the scale. Looking at those paintings for a while, you get lost; the blurred edges seem to disappear, or merge with the edge of your vision, until you are floating above the painting and it envelops you. And then you start to see subtle changes, here and there, which conspire to suggest ghostly images in your mind, lines, planes. The transition between bands of colour suddenly turn into horizons, the band themselves become landscapes, if one is so inclined as to see them.
The Tate Modern gallery in London has a room devoted to Rothko, the nine Seagram murals. It was my first encounter with the works, rather than reproductions in books. It's true of all works of art, that one should always try to see them in the flesh (so to speak); no reproduction can ever make them justice, in all their dimensions. These particular works are quite dark and somber (probably from his latter period), and you want to sit in quiet there, as in a place of worship. They're quite amazing. If anyone has a Rothko in a museum or gallery nearby, I thoroughly recommend going to see it, and sitting or standing in front of the work for a while, and looking beyond the label on the wall, just letting the fields of colour saturate your vision.
(edited to fix a smiley code)
Last edited by Berhael on Sat Nov 26, 2005 9:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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truehobbit
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Ber,
"These particular works are quite dark and somber (probably from his latter period), and you want to sit in quiet there, as in a place of worship."
What a marvelous thing to say. That is exactly how I view Art Museums, almost as places of worship.
Not that I worship the artist but .... at the National Gallery they have Dali's Last Supper on a little mezannine by itself, with a bench in front of it. Every time I'm in that museum I spent the last half hour just sitting on the bench in front of the Dali, and the experience is wonderfully transcendent.
I get that feeling in the Synagogue only occasionally, or ... when I'm travelling for work I try to visit the local churches and leave a small contribution in each of them because these are Latin American countries and the people are mostly devout Catholics ... and I sometimes get that same sense of an enormous amount of human emotion and longing stored there ... - our hope to become the best within us is concentrated there - ... but above all I feel it in the presence of great art or great music.
Jn
"These particular works are quite dark and somber (probably from his latter period), and you want to sit in quiet there, as in a place of worship."
What a marvelous thing to say. That is exactly how I view Art Museums, almost as places of worship.
Not that I worship the artist but .... at the National Gallery they have Dali's Last Supper on a little mezannine by itself, with a bench in front of it. Every time I'm in that museum I spent the last half hour just sitting on the bench in front of the Dali, and the experience is wonderfully transcendent.
I get that feeling in the Synagogue only occasionally, or ... when I'm travelling for work I try to visit the local churches and leave a small contribution in each of them because these are Latin American countries and the people are mostly devout Catholics ... and I sometimes get that same sense of an enormous amount of human emotion and longing stored there ... - our hope to become the best within us is concentrated there - ... but above all I feel it in the presence of great art or great music.
Jn
Last edited by Jnyusa on Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
Some more Rothkos here:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvin ... ry/Rothko/
Jny - I find the hushed tones people normally use in an art gallery interesting, because it's a relatively new phenomenon and dates from the time when society started becoming more secularized, in the wake of the Enlightenment. The public in 18th-century art exhibitions was rather rowdy (at least in England); there are some wonderful cartoons about the Royal Academy exhibitions by Rowlandson... *goes off to search*
Here it is: http://www.wisc.edu/english/tkelley/NAS ... stare2.jpg
Apologies in advance, as there is a bit of nudity, but it gives a good idea of what people went to stare at at the Exhibition; the pun "stare-case" is a play on words on that, and also plays on the fact that the staircase to the Grand Room is indeed very steep, and on busy days there were quite a few mishaps.
Anyway, as I was saying, it was only in the 19th century that the public started behaving quietly at art galleries. I think there's a parallel with theatres and music auditoriums, but I'm not sure about that; someone like Andri, who's a music historian, would be the perfect person to elucidate that.
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvin ... ry/Rothko/
Jny - I find the hushed tones people normally use in an art gallery interesting, because it's a relatively new phenomenon and dates from the time when society started becoming more secularized, in the wake of the Enlightenment. The public in 18th-century art exhibitions was rather rowdy (at least in England); there are some wonderful cartoons about the Royal Academy exhibitions by Rowlandson... *goes off to search*
Here it is: http://www.wisc.edu/english/tkelley/NAS ... stare2.jpg
Apologies in advance, as there is a bit of nudity, but it gives a good idea of what people went to stare at at the Exhibition; the pun "stare-case" is a play on words on that, and also plays on the fact that the staircase to the Grand Room is indeed very steep, and on busy days there were quite a few mishaps.
Anyway, as I was saying, it was only in the 19th century that the public started behaving quietly at art galleries. I think there's a parallel with theatres and music auditoriums, but I'm not sure about that; someone like Andri, who's a music historian, would be the perfect person to elucidate that.
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Voronwë the Faithful
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Ber, thank you so much for those links.
Even in this truncated format, the paintings actually change color as you look at them.
It is interesting that the same collection of general shapes in the same order can convey so many different things just because of the way color is used.
I don't recall that we have any Rothko's at all in the Philadelphia Museum of Art but we do have a whole room devoted to Pollack. I get the same feeling there, that the paintings are mutating before my eyes. But with Rothko the effect is much quieter, of course, and ... more deperate .... which is, I guess, why the Dar Williams song appeals to me so much. She caught astutely the emotion evoked in the viewer.
"I think I'll ask Renoir to tea ..."
I have never wanted to invite Renoir to tea, actually. I guess that says something about taste in art. I was relatively indifferent to Monet until I saw an exhibition of his Winter scenes in Chicago, and then I fell in love with him for the first time. They carry a completely different 'message' from the artist.
That cartoon is very funny, btw. I am reminded of something in my own discipline - economics - which is that economic theory in the late 1700's was debated on the op ed pages of the London Times. Everything that now takes place in professional journals was open to the public... economist would debate the relative merits of different approaches in great detail. We still do that to a certain extent - people write in about their aggravation with the economy, but then it was people like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman having a months-long debate about some esoteric fine point out where everyone could read it.
It astounds me that readers took an interest in that ... but of course in those days very few people were literate, and those who were literate were also well educated in everything affecting governance.
Jn
Even in this truncated format, the paintings actually change color as you look at them.
It is interesting that the same collection of general shapes in the same order can convey so many different things just because of the way color is used.
I don't recall that we have any Rothko's at all in the Philadelphia Museum of Art but we do have a whole room devoted to Pollack. I get the same feeling there, that the paintings are mutating before my eyes. But with Rothko the effect is much quieter, of course, and ... more deperate .... which is, I guess, why the Dar Williams song appeals to me so much. She caught astutely the emotion evoked in the viewer.
"I think I'll ask Renoir to tea ..."
I have never wanted to invite Renoir to tea, actually. I guess that says something about taste in art. I was relatively indifferent to Monet until I saw an exhibition of his Winter scenes in Chicago, and then I fell in love with him for the first time. They carry a completely different 'message' from the artist.
That cartoon is very funny, btw. I am reminded of something in my own discipline - economics - which is that economic theory in the late 1700's was debated on the op ed pages of the London Times. Everything that now takes place in professional journals was open to the public... economist would debate the relative merits of different approaches in great detail. We still do that to a certain extent - people write in about their aggravation with the economy, but then it was people like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman having a months-long debate about some esoteric fine point out where everyone could read it.
It astounds me that readers took an interest in that ... but of course in those days very few people were literate, and those who were literate were also well educated in everything affecting governance.
Jn
Last edited by Jnyusa on Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
And there were far fewer distractions; no "Lost" on television to keep the mildly intelligent entertained.
I like Jackson Pollock too (well, his works; apparently, he was quite the cad personally!), although I haven't seen any of his works, I think. I definitely should visit the Tate Modern in London again.
I love the late eighteenth century. For my research I had to read a lot of pamphlets about the London art world of the time. Oh my! The Purist-Revisionist wars were fluffy lambs gambolling in a field compared with what went on between artists and connoisseurs then. 
I was once at the British Library (an amazing building! I loved simply going there and imagining the seven underground floors full of bookstacks under my feet), in the Rare Books reading room, consulting one of the key pamphlets, and chuckling away to myself... my neighbours stared and clicked their tongues in disapproval. I couldn't be doing serious research if I was having fun. 
My PhD supervisor used to say that the late eighteenth century was one of the last times when people said what they thought without political correctness, and pointed out the difference between Jane Austen's sense of humour and Victorian primness. I am interested in both centuries (18th and 19th), but for very different reasons.
I like Jackson Pollock too (well, his works; apparently, he was quite the cad personally!), although I haven't seen any of his works, I think. I definitely should visit the Tate Modern in London again.
I love the late eighteenth century.
For my research I had to read a lot of pamphlets about the London art world of the time. Oh my! The Purist-Revisionist wars were fluffy lambs gambolling in a field compared with what went on between artists and connoisseurs then. I was once at the British Library (an amazing building! I loved simply going there and imagining the seven underground floors full of bookstacks under my feet), in the Rare Books reading room, consulting one of the key pamphlets, and chuckling away to myself... my neighbours stared and clicked their tongues in disapproval. I couldn't be doing serious research if I was having fun. My PhD supervisor used to say that the late eighteenth century was one of the last times when people said what they thought without political correctness, and pointed out the difference between Jane Austen's sense of humour and Victorian primness.
I am interested in both centuries (18th and 19th), but for very different reasons.
That’s true, vision. Once Victoria entered an art gallery that (incredibly enough, for the period) was showing a collection of MALE nude photographs. Her entourage nearly panicked, desperate to lead her in some other direction and away from the room containing the offending images. No luck: Victoria resolved to see the photos, and see them she did. When she emerged from the room, she offered praise for their quality and calmly headed for the next exhibition. Apparently her “keepers” were the only ones offended.
If Queen Victoria and John Brown were lovers, she wouldn't have been having "something on the side" since she didn't "take up" with Brown until some years after the death of Prince Albert.
No one can say now whether they were lovers, or even married (a notion that makes me chortle). I have my doubts, myself.
I always feel a kind of proprietary attachment to Queen Victoria, since one of my great-grandmothers on my Dad's side looked exactly like her. I have a photo of that great-granny holding a darling infant and that darling infant is moi. In the photo I'm lying across her lap, I'm wearing what could be a christening robe, and she is looking at neither me nor the camera, but glowering at something or someone that must have been just over the photographer's shoulder. She could REALLY glower. She was wearing an ankle-length black dress and had a kind of cap over her white hair, and her white hair was pulled so hard off her face that it pulled her eyes back and gave her an oriental look. She was also wearing a corset, I am sure, since I was reliably informed by her daughter-in-law (my grandmother) that great-grandmother would have gone naked before she would have gone without a corset. A sort of peculiar statement, now that I see it written down. Anyway, I wonder how fat she must have been, since even with the corset on she was a kind of shapeless lump. Sadly, while it is true that she looked like Queen Vic, I now look like HER, and that, my friends, is a sobering and lowering reflection..............
Why I was wearing that dress I can't figure, since no one in our family was ever christened. But there is a picture somewhere of Queen Vic holding one of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren, the child dressed as was I, the Queen glowering as my great-granny did, and it gives me a kind of family feeling.
The mention of the picture brings this thread right back around, since a picture is a picture, right? And while the photographers in question were not Rothko, their separate works have moved at least one viewer to write about the feelings evoked, and that viewer is me and that writing is this.
Berhael said something above that struck me, when she said there was no "Lost" on TV to distract people in "those days". How true.
So many things were different then. I often think how starved people must have been for beauty in those days, and how starved, especially, for music. Imagine that world, without phonographs or radio! The only music you would ever hear would be what you could make yourself, or your sister playing a piano, or at church, or a concert somewhere.
I think that's why "nature" was so important to the idea of beauty and art: because it was THERE and everyone could see it.
No one can say now whether they were lovers, or even married (a notion that makes me chortle). I have my doubts, myself.
I always feel a kind of proprietary attachment to Queen Victoria, since one of my great-grandmothers on my Dad's side looked exactly like her. I have a photo of that great-granny holding a darling infant and that darling infant is moi. In the photo I'm lying across her lap, I'm wearing what could be a christening robe, and she is looking at neither me nor the camera, but glowering at something or someone that must have been just over the photographer's shoulder. She could REALLY glower. She was wearing an ankle-length black dress and had a kind of cap over her white hair, and her white hair was pulled so hard off her face that it pulled her eyes back and gave her an oriental look. She was also wearing a corset, I am sure, since I was reliably informed by her daughter-in-law (my grandmother) that great-grandmother would have gone naked before she would have gone without a corset. A sort of peculiar statement, now that I see it written down. Anyway, I wonder how fat she must have been, since even with the corset on she was a kind of shapeless lump. Sadly, while it is true that she looked like Queen Vic, I now look like HER, and that, my friends, is a sobering and lowering reflection..............
Why I was wearing that dress I can't figure, since no one in our family was ever christened. But there is a picture somewhere of Queen Vic holding one of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren, the child dressed as was I, the Queen glowering as my great-granny did, and it gives me a kind of family feeling.
The mention of the picture brings this thread right back around, since a picture is a picture, right? And while the photographers in question were not Rothko, their separate works have moved at least one viewer to write about the feelings evoked, and that viewer is me and that writing is this.
Berhael said something above that struck me, when she said there was no "Lost" on TV to distract people in "those days". How true.
So many things were different then. I often think how starved people must have been for beauty in those days, and how starved, especially, for music. Imagine that world, without phonographs or radio! The only music you would ever hear would be what you could make yourself, or your sister playing a piano, or at church, or a concert somewhere.
I think that's why "nature" was so important to the idea of beauty and art: because it was THERE and everyone could see it.
Dig deeper.