The Top Ten

Here's our list of the top ten artists at Fifty Two Pieces and the pages that made them so popular. Like most popularity lists this one is skewed by length of time a page has been circulating on the internet. Although Raphael and La Donna Velata made the cut it was just barely. However, Raphael only first appeared during the last week of October. Part of the reason Josef Sudek is a front runner in popularity has to do with the world wide audience Fifty Two Pieces has. Visitors come from all over the world and make frequent revisits. Although most of the over 17,000 visitors are from the United States, Canada and Great Britain, people from over 100 countries have dropped in on Fifty Two Pieces.

Check out these artists and the other 42 that we have presented in the last year. For each one on the Top Ten List we've also included a link to all of their posts.

Franz Kline
Franz Kline - Rue and Steve Martin
Etchings and Poems

All things Franz Kline...



Sol LeWitt
All of Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes

Sol LeWitt's Letter to Eva Hesse

All things Sol LeWitt...

Karl Hofer

Early Hour

All things Karl Hofer...

Josef Sudek

Labyrinths and Windows

Prague Panoramics

Portraits of Czech Friends

All things Josef Sudek...

Roy Lichtenstein

Van Gogh Appropriations

Sweet Dreams Baby

All things Roy Lichtenstein...

William Adolph Bouguereau

Nature's Fan

All things Bouguereau...

Ann GaleInspiration from Lopez Garcia and Giacometti
And Lucian Freud

All things Ann Gale...

Gustave Courbet

Self Portraits

All thing Courbet...

Mark Rothko

No. 14 - 1960

Other Visiting Rothkos

All things Rothko...

Raphael

La Donna Velata and La Fornarina

All things Raphael...

Amy had this to say today...

My personal favorite, the artist I most enjoyed learning about this year, is you LaValle. This project taught me so much about partnership in writing and learning. It has been invaluable for me. I have logged into Fifty Two Pieces for the last time and no new years resolution will ever be the same.

LaValle had this to say on this last day of 2009...

Starting tomorrow, I'll no longer be thinking about what I'll be writing about on Fifty Two Pieces, nor will I be researching what that writing will be about, nor will I be waking up early to actually write it. Not doing all of that in turn will be leaving hours of extra time every day. What is she going to do you might ask? Voice from the Couch is also waiting to hear and not too patiently for that answer.

Well, I'll be starting a photography blog Portland Through My Lens. I'm challenging myself to ride the Portland Streetcar every day of 2010 and take photographs and post at least one of those images. The restrictions I'm imposing on myself are that the photos must be either from the streetcar or within two blocks of the streetcar. And I should amend the challenge to everyday that I'm in Portland since I do hope to travel sometime during the year. I'll have to come up with a sub-challenge for those days.

2009 has been a fine year, full of lots of planning, website maintenance and many discoveries. Thank you Amy for a great year. And thank you to everyone, all 17,000+ visitors, who have helped to make the year as good as it was.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Mark Rothko

Yesterday, Voice from the Couch couldn't put down the Monet and Modernism book. He had already read up on Andy Warhol and then found Mark Rothko in an earlier section. Voice had this to say... "Well of course, Rothko would be connected to Monet. This is great." Some time later, Voice let me have the book back and I was able to continue my reading on Rothko and some of his thoughts on Monet.

The reactions [of the viewers]...say unanimously my work has the power to convery anew way of looking. This message becomes visible through a new structural language they have never experienced before. In my pictures you find an unspoiled, conscious, elemental humanity. Even the pictures of Monet have something of this, which is why I prefer Monet to Cezanne... Despite the general view that Cezanne created a new way of looking at things and was the father of modern painting, I prefer Monet. Monet was the greater artist of the two. I don't agree with the current public opinion about the colorists and their art... because color in itself is among the sensory components of art.

This quote is from a conversation between Rothko and Alfred Jensen on June 17, 1953.

The two paintings above show Claude Monet's Water Lily painting from 1916 and on the right Mark Rothko's untitled, 1952 in similar yellow greens and lavenders. Rothko has taken the horizontal Monet with its visual field of waterlilies and made it vertical. Rothko carries the abstraction one more step. Take a look at the Rothko piece and you can that see his technique of taking spaces filled with color and then have them hover is very similar to the inner spaces of surface found in Monet's waterlily paintings.

And of course there is also the series aspect of Rothko's work. Much like Warhol (see yesterday's posting), Rothko is indebted to Monet for pioneering the concept of repetition, the creation of a series. A prime example of that would be his Seagram murals (see below). Originally designed for the Four Seasons the original plan was for seven – that is all the rooms the restaurant could handle. How many did Rothko produce? Not just the nine that ultimately became part of the Tate collection but 21 others for a total of 30. To see all of the Tate murals click here. There's also a curator's video at that site as well as gallery notes. The image below is of three of the murals. Voice from the Couch is making plans to see these sometime this year! Until then he plans to make frequent visits to the Portland Art Museum's Monet - Waterlilies.

Milton Avery ~ Rothko and Matisse Connections

Still Life with Flowers by Milton Avery sold at Christie's in 2005. When I first saw this painting, the name Matisse flashed in front of my eyes. It certainly has some of the same elements of Matisse's Red Studio from 1911. In Still Life with Flowers Avery has chosen red for his walls and table top (Matisse, walls are red), has still life elements (Matisse, still life elements) and some of his own paintings (Matisse, a few of his paintings). Although Avery had embraced color and form reduction in his early paintings it wasn't until after he was exposed to Matisse's work that he incorporated the "Fauve attitude toward non-associative color". There seemed to be a link to Matisse – some even thought of Avery as the American Matisse. However, Avery often denied the influence of Matisse on his work, "saying that it was too hedonistic for his taste," Barbara Haskell from the Whitney has written in her book Milton Avery of the connection between Avery and Matisse. Feel free to choose yes or no.



It seems that Matisse's Red Studio had an influence on another artist, Mark Rothko. In Week 4 here at Fifty Two Pieces, we looked at Rothko's Homage to Matisse. Rothko attributed all that he knew about color to Matisse. 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 at 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.

Louis Kaufman (Annette Kaufman's husband) had a slightly different view of influences on Rothko's work, at least his earlier work before 1945. Kaufman knew Rothko from their days growing up in Portland. When Rothko arrived in New York in the late 1920's, Kaufman introduced him to Milton Avery. Louis Kaufman was interviewed by the Smithsonian and remembers this about Avery and Rothko...

I took Marcus to Milton and then he became a real fanatic on the work of Milton. It had an immediate effect on his work. If you have the big book on Rothko, you'll see that some of the early Rothkos could be mistaken, of the same period, for Milton's work, practically the same compositions and so forth. He soon got out of that. It was a sort of natural homage to a man he admired. One thing it did do, I think very definitely, it cleared up Marcus' sense of color remarkably.

So there you have it -- Avery linked to Matisse, Rothko linked to Matisse, Rothko linked to Avery.

Josef Sudek on Youtube, always part of the Avant Garde

Rattling around the internet (we've left GW and are now into a new age so I've dropped the 's', it's time), I looked at many articles and sites discussing Josef Sudek. To keep this post simple and direct, I'll just post this moody video in Czech. It's easy to become lost in the language and the images. As Mark Rothko and others would say, just give Sudek a few minutes. six to eight depending upon your download time...

For you, Josef Sudek

Rothko – No. 14 1960, Emotion and Myth

"In essence, it is emotionality which replaced the myth. The common designation for emotionality is mood." ... Mark Rothko

To stand as Rothko intended 18 inches from his paintings, the viewer becomes part of the painting. Here the people in the room are seeing with their eyes but are not engaged with the painting. They're missing the emotionality of the color that creates a vibrancy and at times an urgency. It's about contemplation in our world where myths have receded into the background. Color creates the emotion replacing the myth that was once there.

Renee Jorgensen wrote about this in her paper published on line at DismantledThoughts:

Rothko’s search for myth, and subsequent reliance on emotionality was motivated by

“dissatisfaction with partial and specialized truths and the desire to immerse ourselves with the

felicity of an all-inclusive unity.” He sought to re-establish myth by stripping away borrowed

forms, revealing the meaninglessness of representation, and thereby creating space for the age to

generate new myths. Emotionality, as the last powerful expression of the unity and

connectedness of individuals, was the sole form capable of ushering the viewer into the presence

of the metaphysical. Perhaps, if the paintings succeeded in their attempts to create such an

experience, the cultural ideology would slowly shift, building a framework capable of generating

a myth for our age. Ultimately Rothko’s paintings are as directly representational as possible in

an age without myth. To precipitate the change that would make possible the return of the

figure, painting had to be stripped of every particular, leaving only those elements capable of

creating mood: color, scale, and time.

My husband, Voice from the Couch, reminded me as we've talked of Rothko of the first time he saw Homage to Matisse at the Portland Art Museum. It wasn't until he stood directly in front of the canvas and looked that he saw the colors vibrate. Later at lunch he said he could still feel the warmth and joy coming from the top yellow/orange. "I wouldn't have really seen his painting unless I had stood in such close proximity to it."

Rothko Said True Art Has the Spirit of Myth

I have been wondering, for a while, about the myth of Iphigenia.
She was the daughter of Agamemnon, the Mycenean king. Her name means strong born.
Agamemnon ticked off the goddess Artemis by killing an animal on her temple the day he was to sail from Aulis to Troy to start a big war.
Artemis stopped the wind so the men could not sail. A seer told Agamemnon to trick his daughter into coming to Aulis so he could sacrifice her to Artemis. Iphigenia thought she was going to Aulis to marry Achilles, but when she and her mother got there she was taken to the alter and a knife was placed at her throat. At this moment Artemis substituted a deer for her (some say it was Pan) and took her to Tauris, where she made her the goddess Hecate.

I think, especially in color field, Rothko was looking for a felt knowledge of being. Myth helps convey that in words, it isn't roped into being the least bit logical, it's all metaphor. In color field you either feel something or you feel something else. If you can describe it, great, and if you can't, great. I think the same is true when you give yourself to myth. The beauty is how open it is, this work, this whole world really. You can sit down and do it yourself, if you can just stop thinking long enough.

Above: Study related to The Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Rothko, 1942-1943

Rothko, Poetry, Essays, No. 14 1960

Many times painters are known only for their paintings. No one knows they have degrees in physics like Enrique Martinez Celaya who majored in applied physics at Cornell and then left his physics doctoral studies at UC Berkeley to pursue his love of art. His painting is on the fourth floor of the Jubitz.



Nor do we know they've written treatises on art as Rothko did in his The Artist's Reality - Philosophies of Art. Or poetry as Rothko did early on...

... Heaven is like a lamp in the fog

At the end of a long, dark road.

It has a wan glimmer.

And if flame-winged figures roam

In  other worlds than this--

Figure of joy,  flame-winged exquisite, ...

Pursuing more poetry and song lyrics such as the Dar Williams from the other day, you'll find entries such as this on the "internets".

No. 14, 1960

The docent asked how it made us feel,

A pallette of red, darkness.

"Violence."

"Rage."

"Hate."

Heads bobbed in unison.

Their assumptions soon validated

By the guide's eager gossip,

Your late-life suicide.

As the group's feet echoed

Unenthusiastically into another atrium

I stood, transfixed with warmth,

Alone in the pure passion -

Your painting.

Emotion framed on canvas.

A scraggly, fading rectangle surrounded

By a deep crimson darkness.

Life is simple and messy and pure.

-J.D. Nielsen

http://concretefiction.blogspot.com/2007/12/parting-gift.html

Rothko Reminds me of Diebenkorn

I grew up in Hood River, I was born in the 70's when it was an apple town not known for windsurfing. I got a job the day I turned 15 (I still have my laminated workers permit). I flipped burgers after school and once a week I rode the bus to a couple's house who moved from New York to Hood River Oregon, to ski and sail. They were artists in their late 30's. She did wood block prints and painted, he wrote. I changed diapers on their baby for a few hours a week. When I turned 16 they moved to San Francisco. They flew me down and took me to the first museum exhibit I would see, large rooms filled with huge paintings by Richard Diebenkorn. I didn't know at the time what made that art. I sat for a long time and stared at Ocean Park #67 (seen above)Ocen Park #129 (seen below) and others. The exhibition included dozens of Calder mobiles hanging all over the museum, in stairwells and in the rooms with the Diebenkorn's. Everyone was impressed, I was confused.
Diebenkorn, like Rothko, was an abstract expressionist. He was born in 1922 in Portland Oregon. He moved to San Francisco at the age of 2, but I think in those early years he caught a Rothko vibe in this city of roses.


I remember how I sat in the MOMA and wondered why I felt like there was something I just didn't get about these canvas' of color. How little I knew about art, and museums, and abstraction and expression. I was 16, I thought beauty was the apple orchards in blossom and painted fingernails.

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.