(piano jazz music)
- [Narrator] We're in the galleries at the
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
I'm seeing this beautiful, luminous Mark Rothko.
It's number 210, number 211, Orange
and it dates to 1960.
- [Narrator] It is hard for me to verbalize
my relationship with this painting.
It just makes me want to be quiet.
It surrounds me even though it is a flat plain
where these orange rectangles and squares
hover and vibrate against this lavendery
but dark purple field.
It makes my whole body feel like it's vibrating.
- [Narrator] Quiet, contemplative, is exactly how I feel.
It almost feels like an intrusion
that we're speaking in front of the painting.
There's something about the horizontals of the forms
that make everything feel as if they're moving
ever so slowly, almost the way the clouds form and un-form.
And the way in which those forms fill the space
but then push out forward and then recede
also simultaneously back into the pictorial space
is slow and gentle and densely aesthetic.
- [Narrator] How can something painted so flatly,
though we see a lot of brushstrokes in it,
it creates this deep illusionistic space.
- [Narrator] It really seems to be basically two colors
and yet each of those colors are seen
infinitely modulated.
There are so many yellows and oranges
within those spaces and then even the
purple that functions both as a space
that the orange can occupy but then
somehow also as a frame.
It's got an infinite set of variations.
- [Narrator] Rothko, by the time he painted this in 1960
had been painting abstractly for 20 years
and yet in that practice there's similarities
but no picture is the same.
And in this particular one,
you see these shifting shapes and
there are places where the orange is
more densely painted and other places
where it's really thin so that
because it is painted entirely purple underneath,
that you also get the sense of a veil.
- [Narrator] It's really instructive to look
at the decisions that Rothko made
and I find especially intriguing the edges of the orange,
the way in which they feather and the
complexity of the relationship that he draws
between the purple and the orange.
This idea that pure color in pure form
could resonate in a way that was spiritual,
that was profound was central to some
of the thinking of the abstract expressionists
and I think especially important to Rothko.
The idea that this was a painting that would
elicit deep human emotion.
- [Narrator] In the mid 20th century
there is less conversation around spirituality
in art and Rothko was throughout his career
concerned with thinking about painting
and its relationship to the spiritual.
And not being connected to any kind of
specific religious dogma, but rather,
that much larger idea about there being
something larger than us and where do we
or how do we stand in relationship to it.
- [Narrator] This is painting that develops
in the post war era at a moment when
society had some fundamental questions in front of it.
This was the aftermath of the holocaust,
this was the aftermath of atomic weaponry,
this is a moment when important philosophical
questions are being asked and Rothko is confronting those
but is not using the visual vocabulary of a past era.
He's not showing angels.
He's thinking about how is it possible
to touch the spiritual in our modern age.
- [Narrator] And thinking about the year of this painting,
1960, this is a fiery orange painting
and this is just as the civil rights movement
and so much activism was literally catching fire.
And I think that we can't ignore that combination
and its possibilities of being on Rothko's mind.
- [Narrator] So this is a spiritual and
transcendent painting but it is very much
a product of this moment.
(piano jazz music)