Rothko Was Here Before –– Homage to Matisse

View of Portland is the most recent of three Mark Rothko paintings to be loaned to the Portland Art Museum. Shortly after Christie's auctioned Homage to Matisse (1954), shown on the left, in November 2005 for $22m dollars it was hung in a corner of the first floor of the Jubitz' Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Its corner "roommate", shown on the right (from a flickr photo with an unknown person), was another Rothko, also on loan. This yellow Rothko is said to have been loaned by Kate Rothko Prizel and was here close to a year after the opening of the Jubitz' Center. Prizel is Rothko's daughter from his second marriage to Mary Alice (Mell) Beistle who died six months after Mark Rothko's death in 1970. Both paintings were part of nearly eight hundred paintings in Rothko's estate at the time of his death. After the estate had sold them all at deeply discounted rates to a gallery in New York, Prizel and her brother sued the estate for fraud, ultimately winning and securing the return of all but one hundred paintings. Homage to Matisse was not one of them. It ended up in a vault until the Christie's sale in 2005. Prizel and her brother regret that it was not one of the paintings to come back since it was one they had grown up with in the family home as children.

Why had Rothko kept Homage to Matisse with him after he finished it while choosing to store many others in his studios? Homage had a great deal of meaning for Rothko. He had painted it in 1954 the year Matisse died. In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art began to permanently display Matisse's Red Studio. Rothko told friends that he credited Matisse with his understanding of color. "You became that color, you became totally saturated with it as if it were music". According to one friend visiting from Italy, he had told Mell: "You remember when I used to pass my days at the Museum of Modern Art looking a Matisse's Red Studio? You asked: why always that and only that picture? You thought I was wasting my time. But this house you owe to Matisse's Red Studio. And from those months and that looking every day all of my painting was born." .... Rothko's painting certainly had changed in the late 1940's. This was when he began to paint the large areas of color that he is remembered for the most, shifting from less figurative but more abstract paintings such as Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944. Both Kate Prizel and her brother Christopher Rothko remember Slow Swirl as the painting that their father worked on just after he met their mother Mell. It also had hung in their family home as they grew up as children. The Museum of Modern Art in New York received it as a gift from Mell Rothko's estate.

Edith Sachar

Just three days after the inauguration of Obama it seems fitting to write about Rothko’s first marriage to Edith Sachar, which happened just three days after Roosevelt was elected. Three days is not a long time, but it feels like a long time coming.
Between Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration were the worst four months of the depression, the “winter of despair” they called it. Rothko’s economic situation was, according to Edith “horrendous”. She had sworn not to marry anyone idealistic, fearing that you could not live on “air”, but she wrote in a letter to him “you consume me body and soul with your love.” What’s a girl to do?
So they married, and ate bean soup, and couldn’t find any art collectors. Rothko, she said, never wanted more than he had, and only because of his ambition did the fall of the art market get him down.
Much later Dar Williams, who was a poet like Edith, wrote a song about Rothko. She sings in a sad sweet high voice:
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

Maybe so. I don’t know enough about Rothko, or Edith. I know they had something worth living for, and much later, he would slit his wrist because whatever that was wasn’t anymore. Even when they had nothing but bean soup they had something.

View of Portland – Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko painted this landscape in 1928 probably during a visit here from New York to see his family. Rothko had grown up in Portland, attended Lincoln High, went on to Yale on scholarship, staying for two years. Moving to New York the year after his scholarship ran out, he discovered art and attended the Art Students League. While there, he was influenced by Max Weber who exposed his students to the style of Cezanne. Port has an entire post dedicated to this painting, including close-ups of the brushstrokes in the sky with comparisons to Rothko's later color field paintings that he is most famous for. They talk of the influence from Cezanne.I did find this image of ‘Lake Annecy’ by Paul Cézanne (1896) and was struck by its similarity. We'll see where the rest of the week goes.

Final Comparison

“I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning . . . Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
- Miles Davis

Why I can't stop with the Miles Davis stuff, when its Ann Gale week, is beyond me. The two have been linked for me for seven days now. This is an original Davis in pencil, paste and marker. It doesn't remind me of anything Ann Gale, except it makes me wonder what instrument she plays.

I have a mandolin and about a month of lessons down. But I quit. I think I will pick it up, turn it upside down, and play it the way I should have played it all along. With my left hand strumming, because I'm left handed.

Artist's Models, Inspiration, Meditation, Reps

Looking at Gary, you can wonder, “how long did he have to sit for this painting?” Ann Gale spends a great deal of time around her subjects even before “official” painting sessions begin. Once she starts with a model, she may have several sessions for a small painting or sketch. If the interaction between her and the subject coalesces, then three hour periods of painting, twice a week for anywhere from four months to three years begin.

That’s a long time to be sitting in one place and in Gary’s case, with no clothes. What makes a person agree to pose for three hours with only a short stretch break every half hour or so? Most of Ann Gale’s models are her friends or family, but others are professional models. One motivator can be money, but over and above that, some say that it’s the desire to be part of the creation of art, the artist’s inspiration.

During a painting session, the artist is busy, drawing or painting. What is the model doing other than holding still, holding a pose? Mostly they’re concentrating on what’s going on in the room, the sound of the pencil on paper or brushes on the canvas. Much like people who meditate, they watch their breathing and in many cases they’re monitoring their bodies, the muscles that may be cramping, the itch here, the chill there. Since Ann Gale’s portraits take years to complete in some cases, we the viewers are able to see changes in their moods and bodies. What we look like now is not what we’ll look like three years from now. Gale captures that transition in time, both in the portrayal of the subjects and the space around them.

Modeling is definitely hard work. Gary Stuart, one model, is quoted as saying “By the end of three hours I fell like I need traction.” Robert Treat, another model, says “For me, it is like reps. It is more of an athletic experience. That’s what the artists are doing as well, with their paintings and drawings: sketch, after sketch, after sketch.”

All of this discussion of modeling reminds me of the brief period five years ago when I posed for a group of artists in Santa Rosa. I was asked to wear different outfits of my choice for three separate sessions. Each session was broken into the classic minute, two minute, five minute, fifteen minute, half hour sketch periods. Since I had not done any posing before, the people participating were pleased with how well I could hold the poses. And yes, I did watch my breath and did become very attuned to what was happening in that room. One artist gave me this sketch to thank me for spending my time with them. She especially liked my choice of colorful biking clothes even though she did her sketch in black pencil.

Song One, Sixteen Minutes Long

Mission accomplished. I sat face to face with Gary, about seven feet away, and pressed play. Miles Davis and Gil Evans began Sketches of Spain with their rendition of Concierto de Aranjuez. It was written in 1939 by Joaquin Rodrigo for the palace gardens. The second movement is the one Davis and Evans cover, it was either inspired by the miscarriage of the composer's first child or the bombing of Guernica. Considering that, it surprises me that my take on Gary wasn't dark or depressing despite the pensive music and contrary to the descriptions of Ann's work, by critics I read online. In fact I felt immediately at peace with Gary and thought he seemed like someone who would enjoy the album with me, if he could hear it. Right away I noticed all kinds of places where the paint Ann used was brighter orange and fleshy pink. There is no light source in the paintings, but on the knees, wrists, ears and throat and in a band around his middle are these crisp pastel blocks. These are the areas most alive. Ann said in an interview once “the light is where the emotion is.” It isn't that Gary is, as John Motley of the Mercury said, “profoundly melancholy”, “vacant of expression” and “disconnected from the physical world.” I couldn't disagree more. It is that Gary seems to be human, and in this situation, as humans do, he has become a mirror of Ann. He is concentrating, with slow shallow breath and above all, patience. As the artist herself is patient, she is, after all, a self described "humanist".
Miles Davis said of the Concierto de Aranjuez “That melody is so strong that the softer you play it, the stronger it gets and the stronger you play it, the weaker it gets.” It was in the soft melodies that my heart beat hardest and when it began to grow louder it lost something. What I thought would be dark wasn't, This experience did not make me inward but open. I felt comforted by Gary and thought if he could say something it might be “could you please turn that up a bit?”

Floating Light

I haven't done my experiment yet, but I have done some research and I can give a teaser. Ann Gale has this way of making paint float on the canvas in front of and behind her subject which creates an almost ghostly atmosphere. It gives the figure a mood that is more than his or her expression.

The third piece on Sketches of Spain is called Will O The Wisp, taken from a 19th century gypsy ballet. More on the ballet later, but if you don't know what a Will O The Wisp is, I'll tell you it's another name for these flashes of light seen above bogs and marshes and thought to be spirits of the dead or ghosts. Folklore from the world over as long ago as the 14th century have included stories of these strange lights which science informs is the meeting of methane gas with hydrogen in the air that catch fire.

Ann Gale experiments with floating light as a paint technique, Miles Davis took a song about floating light from a ballet about a woman haunted by her dead lover. These two each created an atmosphere of another world and time using floating light as subject matter. This is just one thing Sketches of Spain and Gary have in common. Follow?