Humankind As a Construction of Colours

The building that houses the Louis Vuitton Foundation is a sail-shaped piece of modern architecture on the outskirts of Paris, close to the famous Boulogne Park, where the Seine weaves through the eternal and rich cultural fabric of the city. It is an architectural masterpiece by Frank Gehry, capturing the winds of new and unseen exhibitions not only for France, but for the whole of Europe. This time, the foundation is hosting a retrospective of Mark Rothko’s paintings for the first time since 1999. The New York Times has described the works presented at the exhibition as ‘majestic and vulgar at the same time’, while also having found their home in Gehry’s glass embrace. The exhibition includes 115 paintings, many of them borrowed from the National Gallery of Art and the Phillip’s Collection in Washington, D.C., the Tate in London, and many other national and private collections. The paintings have been combined into a cohesive whole, gifting us a dizzying experience that allows the visitor to plunge into the mysterious depths of Rothko’s creative imagination.

The project was led by Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury goods corporation LVMH and founder of the Louis Vuitton Foundation. He would like Rothko, an artist still underappreciated in France and Europe, to finally be recognised and popularised. According to Arnault, the inadequate representation of Rothko in museums and private collections has created a gap in the European cultural scene, something this retrospective aims to fill.

The exhibition, curated by the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, and Suzanne Pagé, a representative of the foundation, takes place over four floors of Gehry’s sail-shaped glass building. The exhibition examines in detail the evolution of Rothko’s artwork from his early figurative paintings to the famous abstract pieces that have become a major part of the artist’s legacy.

Later, the dramatic narrative of the exhibition takes an unexpected turn when Rothko begins to consider the human condition in wartime, moving towards surrealism and ancient mythology. This concept was not chosen in vain. It provides a sharp description of the artist’s creative and artistic transformation, which in 2009, was depicted in a play by John Logan. This confirms how masterfully the entire career of Rothko is reflected in the exhibition, with a detailed overview of his development as an artist. Visitors to the exhibition are guided from early figurative works to his ‘classic’ works of the 1950s.

As the artist’s son and one of the curators of the exhibition, Christopher Rothko emphasizes that the exhibition should be viewed as a tabula rasa — a clean space, not an empty space. In a quote in the exhibition catalogue, he refutes the idea that Rothko’s art is meaningless, arguing that abstraction is a language that allows one to convey feelings and the more complex problems of society. For this reason, Jackie Wullschläger, a visual arts columnist for the Financial Times, said of the exhibition: ‘It is the most compelling retrospective of an abstract expressionist I have ever seen in Europe’.

Since 1949, Rothko’s early figurative paintings have been transparent in colour, adding shapes without details or more precise references to an object. Layered backgrounds, in which gently patterned colour blocks stood out, formed Rothko’s abstract work, where he delved into the deepest problems of life and art. The artist’s giant canvases, presented today as masterpieces of avant-garde art, are presented in the retrospective not as an artistic choice, but rather as a deliberate abandonment of the easy path of realism. To paraphrase John Logan and Niche, it is the birth of tragedy, that leads to catharsis.

The results of this artistic choice are presented in the third exhibition hall, and include the most famous paintings by Rothko, most of which were created between 1947 and 1958. Works such as No. 21 (1949) and Light Cloud, Dark Cloud (1957), are known as ‘multiform’ canvases. Red, yellow, orange and purple merge into an intense flow of energy, conveying the spirit of Rothko’s clearly recognizable style. Moving away from this mix of light and colour, the exhibition takes us back to 1958, when Rothko was commissioned to create a series of paintings for Philip Johnson’s restaurant in the Seagram building in New York City, where the Four Seasons Hotel was to be located. The exhibition pays much attention to this stage in Rothko’s artistic career, and highlights in particular, the ideological disagreements that led him to abandon this project. This stage in the artist’s career became a kind of moral laxity that prevented him from converting to a commercial approach to art.

Throughout the exhibition, Rothko’s relentless exploration of colour and form is clearly visible, which only serves as a metaphor for the real challenge posed by the artist — that of understanding and presenting the mystery of human emotions and experiences. Even in a series of black-and-grey works created between 1969 and 1970, that sometimes, in an oversimplified manner, speak of the artist’s melancholy and suicide, Rothko’s works seem to foreshadow a wave of minimalism that was soon to flood the world of contemporary art. These works are displayed in one of the halls of the Frank Gehry building with the highest ceiling. They are located next to large sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of Rothko’s unrealised dream of holding an exhibition next to Giacometti’s works, at the UNESCO offices in Paris. At the final stop, visitors can admire works from the last years of Rothko’s life, where flashes of light radiate from the darkness. Between 1969 and 1970, multicoloured squares and rectangles were reduced to straight, bipolar compositions reminiscent of the lunar surface, with deep, thick, black colours covering richer grey fields.

‘I am only interested in the expression of basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, etc.,’ commented Rothko in 1957. This is the central motive of the exhibition. The retrospective renounces any interest in the principles of colour or abstraction, to highlight Rothko’s strong commitment to feelings. Visitors are encouraged to reflect on Rothko’s message to humanity and life. The organizers of the exhibition invite them to deeply immerse themselves in this experience and hope to remind the world of Rothko’s courage in trying to embrace the concept of humanity during difficult times. Rothko’s works are a refuge in which the boundary between emotion and abstraction disappears, allowing viewers to simultaneously immerse themselves in the sublime and the vulgar, in a world that is, too often, overshadowed by unnecessary detail.

Text author: Ignas Zalieckas

Photos: Courtesy Louis Vuitton Foundation