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Schama’s power of art
August 1, 2007
PBS has grapped another great series from the BBC with Simon Schama’s Power of Art.
The show has is blessed with some great writing.
Here’s Schama talking about Rothko.
“One morning in the spring of 1970, I went into the Tate Gallery and took a wrong, right turn and there they were, lying in wait. No it wasn’t love at first site. Rothko had insisted that the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low. It was like going into the cinema, expectation in the dimness.
Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe.
Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I wasn’t sure where that was and whether I wanted to go. I only know I had no choice and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic, but I got it all wrong that morning in 1970. I thought a visit to the Seagram Paintings would be like a trip to the cemetary of abstraction – all dutiful reverence, a dead end.
Everything Rothko did to these paintings – the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn and the loose stainings – were all meant to make the surface ambiguous, porous, perhaps softly penetrable. A space that might be where we came from or where we will end up.”
They’re not meant to keep us out, but to embrace us; from an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being.”
I watched the Turner and Rothko shows and a couple of facts caught my attention.
1. When Turner’s painting, “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” was first shown in public, tens of thousands of people stood in line to see the poltical statement being made about Napoleon and France. What art form has that kind of political power today?
2. Mark Rothko toiled for 20 years before he devised a radical new way to move people with art.
“The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
Rothko
Posted by Ed Cotton
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Influx Insights is the blog of BSSP's Influx Strategic Consulting Division. Up and running since 2004, the blog covers branding and the related areas of trends and technology.
