Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

divisions, and the bleeding of the shapes into the ground fused both intoa single plane, further reinforcing the overall unity of the painting. Oftenthe lower layers of atmospheric color seemed to radiate through the upperlayer and/or create a glowing “halo” effect around the rectangular forms.Despite these formal simplifications, Rothko emphasized: “I’m notinterested in the relationship of color or form to anything else. I’m interestedin expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. Andthe fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with mypictures shows that I can communicate those basic emotions. … The peoplewho walk before my pictures are having the same religious experience I hadwhen I painted them.” It is impossible to pin down any specific meaningsto Rothko’s paintings. When seen from a close distance as intended, theirhuge size and sense of engulfing color suggest that the viewer transcendhis or her ordinary feeling of self. This self-transcendence can lead to amystical sense of cosmic identification or to a more tragic, death-like lossof self. The subtle color modulations seem to dematerialize both surfacesand edges so that the rectangular planes become floating blocks of etherealcolor that gradually envelop the viewer in a total color experience. By analternate impression, the rectangles seem to recede, turning into layers ofveils that hide some mysterious presence the viewer is challenged to penetrate.Spending time with a Rothko painting makes observers more awareof themselves as involved in the act of perceiving and invites them into akind of silent inner dialogue or drama. It is appropriate that one of Rothko’slast works was the hexagonal meditation chapel in Houston whose wallsare filled with fourteen huge panels in deep red-brown colors.Barnett Newman (1905–1970) drew a fundamental contrast betweenhis approach to a painting based only on a lofty “pure idea” and the external,formative beauty of European art, which wanted “to exist inside the realityof sensation.” Instead, Newman aimed for a “formless form“ to suggest themysterious sublime and “the impact of elemental truth.” Perhaps as earlyas 1945 he realized that a straight line need not evoke a geometric abstractworld but could merely divide the surface of a picture while still suggestingthe subjectivity of the artist. For Newman, the simple line was a primordial,universal, archetypal gesture of human creation, and he felt his independentvertical line could serve as a simple personal gesture within the picture-spaceof his extremely simplified and color-focused paintings.In Newman’s wall-sized “zip paintings” beginning in 1948, hisblurred vertical lines blend into their surrounding color-field and echo thevertical framing edges of the picture, giving the actual, material edge ofthe painting a compositional function and identity (Figure 19). The verti-131