EUROPE IMAGES INTERNATIONAL - M5

Synopsis

A giant figure in the world of painting with a mostly - but not exclusively - abstract body of work whose luminous colors call into question the possible beauty of the world and yet its vacuity and also man's solitude. Mark Rothko (born in Russia in 1903 and died after committing suicide in New York in 1970) gave to abstraction "the emotional power of music and poetry". According to him, he did not paint objects, but ideas. He reintroduced into painting a function that had been abandoned since the 16th century in Europe and which seemed the sole preserve of figurative works: being icons, obviously decorative images but mostly a means for our necessary dialogue with nothingness. Like Turner, whom Mark Rothko admired and of whom someone had said that he painted nothingness but that it was very lifelike. His artistic journey was closely linked to the painters which offered the United States their first internationally important pictorial school, the "Abstract Expressionists" or "School of New York": Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Kline, or Motherwell.