Bacon Porn

A great video on Bacon... 

In conjunction with the Met’s newly-opened Bacon retrospective it’s good to have a look at this BBC documentary. The program consists of a series of conversations between Bacon and interviewer Melvyn Bragg, starting with commentary during a side-show presentation at the Tate Gallery in London. Later in the evening, Bacon is followed through various bars hanging out, drinking, and gambling. In another segment, Bacon provides a tour of his painting studio and a glimpse at his reference photographs of distorted humans. The artist discusses his theories, influences, and obsessions.

I loved his views on Mark Rothko:

"Rothko completely escaped me. I mean I always used to think that abstract painting might at least bring you the most lovely, vibrant colors... but they... you know they've got a room of them here [at Tate] - if you want to be really depressed for the rest of the day, you could go into that room. I suppose you could say that is a quality. It's just that I hate that dirty maroon color he has used in those things and if I wanted really to be depressed, I would go in for a few hours into that Rothko room just to look at maroon, I could go and look at the art of maroon they could roll out for me. I think they are just the dreariest paintings that have ever been made..."

I agree completely!!

Rothko power

We manage to dutifully TiVO all episodes of Simon Schama’s Power of Art to try and understand the power of art as Simon makes a case for it through the lives and works of artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, Jacques-Louis David , Turner et. al..

I liked his take on the majority of the episodes so far and it taught me a lot about art history (of which I have no formal instruction). It was with a lot of anticipation that I awaited his take on Mark Rothko (Latvian-born American Abstract Expressionist Painter, 1903-1970), but after seeing it yesterday, I realized that I still did not understand nor have a better appreciation for Rothko’s works. I still did not see in it what Simon and lot of others saw…

Often, with the additional psychological layering of the life of the artist on top of the painted canvas, the work tends to take on additional sensibilities that appeal to our senses and we seem to get a better maturity for the artist and the represented work… Even after sitting through an hour of Simon talking about Mark Rothko and his works, I did not get it..

It must be me…

The following excerpt is from an excellent article on art and synesthesia… An interesting read.

Rothko's horizontal divisions of soft floating colored spaces are an invitation to enter into the depth of the color fields, and to become totally saturated with them. The undefined background envelops the viewer and evokes a spiritual feeling of infinity. The painting has an almost breathing energy. Because of the luminous quality, the colors seem to move back and forth, as if it were another living presence. Rothko created his own biology of art. By the layering of one experience over another, Rothko's paintings seem to aspire the emotional condition of music, suspending sound in color, by radiating visually as silent music. The sensibility of the color is real and abstract at the same time. Rothko himself felt that the works could express emotions associated with universal themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime. In this paintings, Rothko meditated on how the origins of life could function as a metaphor for the origins of consciousness.


Note: Mark Rothko’s real name was Marcus Rothkovich. The name change and shortening to a more convenient Americanized form had me thinking of the following excellent op-ed piece in the NYT yesterday.