Friday, July 12, 2013

Rothko and the colour fields with Idea #162 Anthropology

This weeks journey through Modern Art at OPEN Ealing  continued the analysis of American Abstraction this time looking at Mark Rothko along with Barnett Newman and Philip Guston.

Rothko is famous for the works he created initially for the New York  Seagram that he then decided would be better suited for the Tate in London which arrived just as the discovery was made of his suicide (February 25th  1970).
Rothko is associated with 'Colour Field', by the winter of 1949-50 he'd  arrived at his own mature style, in which two or three luminous colour rectangles arranged one above another appeared to float within a radiant 'colour field'. By 1950, this format of rectangles of colour within a larger 'colour field' had become one of the most important features of Rothko's work.

 
The painting on the right is "Untitled," by Mark Rothko, it is oil on canvas and measures 69 by 64 inches it was painted in 1963 and 40 years later sold for  $7,175,500, like many of his works it demonstrates the use of  colours with  luminescent qualities, here rich swaths of pigment appear to lift off the plain  2 dimensional surface of the canvas.

Big Idea Number 162 is Anthropology


Originally Anthropology was a single subject that was the study of humans- past and present.
The idea was to understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history. Anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences. A large part of  anthropology is the application of knowledge to the solution of human problems. Anthropology now can be split into at least four areas: sociocultural anthropology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology, and the fascinating anthropological linguistics.



 
 

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