News Art Blog

Of the many concepts of Judaism artist Mark Rothko took to heart, the idea of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “repairing the world,” penetrated the deepest. In Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel, academic and a cultural historian Annie Cohen-Solal cuts to the heart of Rothko’s life and art and sheds new light on how both seemingly had to end at The Rothko Chapel (shown above), the Houston home of Rothko’s final works that he tragically didn’t live long enough to see himself. In this tightly focused new biography, Cohen-Solal shows us both how The Rothko Chapel culminates Rothko’s life-long mission to repair his world and how it continues to serve as a light of hope in our darkening world. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Repairing the World: The Road to The Rothko Chapel."

“The extasy [sic] of abstract beauty,” artist Richard Pousette-Dart scrawled in 1981 in a notebook on a page across from a Georges Braque-looking abstract pencil drawing. Although included in Nina Leen’s iconic 1951 Life magazine photo “The Irascibles” that featured Abstract Expressionist heavyweights Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Pousette-Dart has always stood on the edges, as he does in the photo, of full identification with that group. The “X” factor that frees Pousette-Dart from that and other “-isms” is both his ecstatic spirituality and endless artistic exploration stretching across six decades of work. The new Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Full Circle: Works on Paper by Richard Pousette-Dart takes aim not at pinning down Pousette-Dart, but rather at targeting his insatiable drive to work through the ideas of modern art on paper by continually building them up before breaking them down again. You’ll think you’re touring a group show before realizing that it all came from one artist’s vision—an ecstatic celebration of Richard Pousette-Dart’s celebration of the making of art itself. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Ecstatic Abstract Explorer: Richard Pousette-Dart."

This week’s unveiling of Leo Villareal’s The Bay Lights (shown above), the world’s largest LED sculpture running along 1.8 miles of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, shone a light on more than just the waters between San Fran and Oakland. A recent article in The Wall Street Journalprofiled several “Silicon Valley power players” patronizing Villareal’s $8 million USD light show as well as making other forays into the art world. Since the Medici during the Renaissance, high finance and fine art have always found some partnership that was mutually beneficial. Just as some argue that Medici money was a mixed blessing for art, will the same be said after tech moguls have put their stamp financially on contemporary art? Silicon Valley may save the art world, but what will that art world look like afterwards? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Will Tech Moguls Save the Art World?"

[Image: Leo Villareal. The Bay Lights, 2013.]

In a letter responding to Anthony M. Amore’s editorial “No ‘Thomas Crown Affair’” in The New York Times about the recent robbery at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Georgia Museum of Art guard Ed Tant acknowledged the very real threat posed by thieves, but fingered a very different, less publicized, but more insidiously silent danger to art in museums—museum patrons. After 12 years on the job, Tant describes his primary everyday task as “protecting the art from the art lovers.” From intentional vandalism to accidental encounters with masterpieces, why do museum patrons hurt the ones they love? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Do Museum Patrons Hurt the Ones They Love?"

Mark Rothko only got as far as his sophomore year at Yale before fleeing that WASP nest of anti-Semitism and elitism. Forty-six years later, Yale awarded him an honorary degree in philosophy, but in the meantime the artist wielded his philosophy as much as his paintbrush in pursuit of a kind of painting that matched his kind of thinking. In the exhibitionand companion catalog Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950, we follow Rothko’s path through ten years that saw no less than six distinctive styles of painting, but that resulted in one of the most recognizable signature styles in all of modern art. If you’ve ever wondered how Rothko became Rothko, “to understand Rothko—to see his artistic evolution, comprehend his goals and the means he used to realize them, to live his internal struggle to manifest the human soul and chart that manifestation,” writes Rothko’s son Christopher in the catalog, “one need only study the 1940s.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "When (and How) Rothko Became Rothko."



[Image: Mark Rothko, American (born Russia), 1903−1970. Untitled (Man and Two Women in a Pastoral Setting), c. 1940. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 1986.43.53. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]