Golden Gate

Dog, detail #4

@ 4x16

Pastel

Casey Klahn

News:

The Denver Workshop, May 19th & 20th, has one more space available at this time.  Many thanks to Ken Elliot, who is now blogging, for his encouragement and help putting this one together!

Also, my Portland friend and artist, Sarah Peroutka, is blogging.

Ken Elliot/For the Color.

Sarah Peroutka Studio.

Fractal Abstractal

Dog, detail #2

@16" x 12"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Blogger Sam says that dog's see a different color than you and I.

Abstraction Fraction

Dog, detail #1

@8" x 15"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

I found an old full-sheet abstract work in the bottom of a flat file drawer, and I am enthused about it!  I started playing around with the photo of it on Photoshop, and then decided that cutting it up into pieces would provide better stability within each individual part.  It is a decent pastel as is, but can be more fun broken apart and readdressed. Will I add more marks, or leave each piece as is?  Another possibility might be to run a single print, and then see what the pieces might yield.

What are your thoughts?

Jackson Pollock Would Be 100 Today

***

Today, of all days, you can give yourself permission to go out to the studio and make a huge mess, step in it, and basically cut loose!


Jackson Pollock was born 100 years ago today in Cody, Wyoming, to Presbyterian Irish and Scotch-Irish farmers.  He changed the world.


Telegraph Article on the centenary of Pollock's birth.


What follows is my research post on Jackson Pollock, which has been beviraled by Google and utilized by thousands of university students as a starting point for their studies.

The Colorist

About The Colorist blog.

Galaxy, 1947Jackson Pollock

This post was originally published in 2007. It gets enough attention that I brought it up to date.

See also The Jackson Pollock Researcher for the comprehensive and current links on Jackson Pollock.

Originality was the hallmark of Jackson Pollock's art. He found a way to both connect with, and yet break free of whatever else had been happening with art. It's a little hard to appreciate the originality of Pollock from our high horse of retrospection. I liken it to some of my experiences with rock climbing. Sure, a particular rock climb will have a difficulty rating and a status as severe or hard, but when you go to climb it, you feel that it isn't as hard as described. Well, put yourself in the sticky shoes of the very first ascensionist. What was the experience like for him?

So, imagine the first "pure" abstraction. How does one completely eliminate the subject from a painting? The Abstract Expressionists often likened abstract painting to getting "in touch" with your inner child, because children draw and paint with freedom and innocence. I argued with that comparison until I had my own children picking up pencils and crayons. Now, I completely believe in the childlike aspects of abstract visual expression. Now, I just have to work out my objections to the "primitive man" comparisons to painting abstraction.

My own experience with abstraction took place when I took a workshop from Diane Townsend, who happens to be a great abstractionist with ties to New York and my hero Wolf Kahn.

How do you begin painting abstractly? Townsend unlocked that door for me, and before noon on the first day I was having a great time painting "nothing". I hope to continue my exploration of abstraction in the near future. It actually can be one of the hardest styles to paint in and make anything really good. My abstracts can be seen here and here.

Let's follow some link paths for Jackson Pollock.




Steven Naifeh and Greg Smith have written a Pulitzer prize winning biography titled: Jackson Pollock, An American Saga. I have some serious misgivings about it's historicity, but suffice it to say that it seems to be the "go to" book now for looking at his life. Ed Harris brings it to our attention in his comments about his movie about the keen artist.

Harris also thinks Pollock may have been manic-depressive. Of course, my first inclination would be to look up the paperwork on his 4-F status, just in case that might reveal something about a diagnosis of this or something similar. I guess he also saw therapists, and the records from that probably reveal something, too. Shades of van Gogh.

Pollock's Studio Floor

Don't miss the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton (Long Island). This small property with rustic facilities was purchased by Pollock and Krasner with help from Peggy Guggenheim, who was Pollock's "super-patron". It was here that Pollock began his drip paintings, and you may visit this museum and walk on the floor where his drips are preserved. Could these be considered accidents?

I recommend the Pollock bio written by the director of the P-K House, Helen Harrison.

There is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which I think is a very classy move by the late Lee Krasner, who was left as a widow by her drunken and cheating genius-artist husband. Trying to figure out what made Krasner's relationship with Pollock tick is an exercise in head-trips that some may enjoy. We'll look at the wonderful Krasner a little later in our Abstract Expressionist study this month.

The National Gallery of Art in DC has a good site about the old boy. A quick look at his process is seen in this GIF - Video. Here's a Quicktime featurette of a Hans Namuth film of the Camel-smoking curmudgeon at his task of working a horizontal canvas.

I have to limit the scope of JP references found at the Museum of Modern Art, since they are numerous. Man, this stuff is knee-deep. How does one have an "itinerant childhood"? Uh, never mind the MoMA for now...

Of course, my favorite site for Jackson Pollock is the fun and interactive "Create Your Own" Jackson Pollock by Milos Manetas. It's an ingenious flash page where you drip "paint" on your CRT screen. Of course, you don't control the color - those come as accidents. My only advice is cut loose, don't stay inside the frame, and don't stop too soon!

Links referenced above:
http://www.amazon.com/Jackson-Pollock-American-Steven-Naifeh/dp/0913391190
http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf
http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf/pages/pollock
http://www.pkf.org/
http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/index.htm
http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

Joan Mitchell - Gestural Pursuasion

***

There are many more of my new artworks to show you.  But, I think I'll spread it out and keep my reader's waiting.  Meanwhile, here is the next room in my walking tour of the San Fransisco MOMA.  I favored two strong and large paintings in this room, and the first one was by Joan Mitchell.  I'll tell you about the other one next time.

I had to reach my arms out to either side to gather the dimensions of this painting in my mind.  I found it to be just the span of my arms.  Then, I imagined it on its side, and again there was just the width of my arms.  Gestural.  Approachable.  Edible.

The date interests me a great deal.  The height of the the Modernist movement, in my mind, was 1950.  This piece was done in 1960, and the hues are brighter than those used in the fifties.  Modern, or Mod?

Also, I became more aware than ever of the canvas color, the same as Henri Matisse reveals in Woman With A Hat.  Sort of a warm, barely reddish buff or egg-white color.  These artists definitely are thinking about the dimension of the canvas itself, and you are immersed by the feeling of painting.  

Could my kid do this?  Of course, I know the answer is "no."  But still, the work is far more approachable than Ingres.

Joan Mitchell
Untitled, 1960
83.4" x 74.5"


SFMOMA link to this image.




Joan Mitchell Wikipedia.
Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Bomb Magazine.
The Art Story.
artnet.

Goodbye, Hedda

Artist Hedda Sterne passed away last week at the age of 100.


She was the one woman in that famous photograph of "The Irascibles," taken in New York in 1950.  Remember her, standing on the table (not a chair) in the back of the room? That was the coming of age year for American artists.


Goodbye, Hedda.  You were one lady who stood tall.


"Nobody tried to influence me, I just worked."  Quote HS.



Notes:


I found out through Debu Barve.
Hedda Sterne: The last of ‘The Irascibles.’

ArtDaily.

The Wikipedia article on HS is a good one.


Blogger input. Nancy Natale.


TNYRB, Sarah Boxer.


Photo: Phtotbucket/themissinggrib.

Repost Research

The Colorist

Number 31, 1950
at the MoNA
Jackson Pollock

Lavender Mist, 1954
Jackson Pollock

Here are a selection of Jackson Pollock links.


Jackson Pollock:

• New York Times On Topic for Jackson Pollock-Link. Best to read the NYT if you value critics that use words like "inimitability". Otherwise, follow their Jackson Pollock Navigator until you find an article that makes some sense.
• My dated post on the topic of Jackson Pollock links.
• Squidoo Lens on Pollock.
• MoMA Collection of Pollocks. Link. From the NYT list, but I'll put it here as an important collection.
• The Art News Blog lists these links for Pollock.
• The Pollock-Krasner House.
• Pollocksthebollocks is a blog with a base in Abstract Expressionism.
• The movie about Jackson Pollock has certainly pushed forward his star in the public conscience. My review is found here.
• There is an interesting video legacy of the drip painter which may do much for his posterity as we go further into this digital age. Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg.
• Jackson Pollock Unauthorized. Looks like bootleg prints, but some good info, too.
  

You can't get through Pollock without visiting Abstract Expressionism.

• Here are my posts on the topic.
• I recommend the Wikipedia post on the topic.
• This book, Taschen's Abstract Expressionism, by Barbara Hess, is a good pictorial analysis, by artist, of the great American movement.
• A dated Wordpress blog with some nice AE references.

And the inimitable Clement Greenberg requires some study if you want to cover JP correctly:

• Wikipedia.
• Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Marquis. Did CB invent Modern Art? Read this new bio for extra, extra credit.
  
• I see my local Portland Art Museum has the significant collection of Clement Greenberg's catalogs and private art collection. Wow.
• Official CG site.

The Jackson Pollock Researcher

Number 31, 1950
at the MoNA
Jackson Pollock

Lavender Mist, 1954
Jackson Pollock

This post will be my selection of Jackson Pollock links.

This blog receives an inordinate amount of traffic from the query: Jackson Pollock. Aside from an entertaining study I did about this key light of the Abstractionists, I have to admit that I haven't got much really meaty or original content about him here at The Colorist. Not, at least, of any academic value.

But, for the good of the cause, I will aggregate some research here about Jackson Pollock. Then, the numerous college students who find my site can get on with their studies. By the way, I have been heartened by the otherwise non-Pollock attention that students have paid to The Colorist. Maybe there is some original content in here after all!

Jackson Pollock Research:

• New York Times On Topic for Jackson Pollock-Link. Best to read the NYT if you value critics that use words like "inimitability". Otherwise, follow their Jackson Pollock Navigator until you find an article that makes some sense.
• My dated post on the topic of Jackson Pollock links.
• Squidoo Lens on Pollock.
• MoMA Collection of Pollocks. Link. From the NYT list, but I'll put it here as an important collection.
• The Art News Blog lists these links for Pollock.
• The Pollock-Krasner House.
• Pollocksthebollocks is a blog with a base in Abstract Expressionism.
• The movie about Jackson Pollock has certainly pushed forward his star in the public conscience. My review is found here.
• There is an interesting video legacy of the drip painter which may do much for his posterity as we go further into this digital age. Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg.
• Jackson Pollock Unauthorized. Looks like bootleg prints, but some good info, too.
  

You can't get through Pollock without visiting Abstract Expressionism.

• Here are my posts on the topic.
• I recommend the Wikipedia post on the topic.
• This book, Taschen's Abstract Expressionism, by Barbara Hess, is a good pictorial analysis, by artist, of the great American movement.
• A dated Wordpress blog with some nice AE references.

And the inimitable Clement Greenberg requires some study if you want to cover JP correctly:

• Wikipedia.
• Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Marquis. Did CB invent Modern Art? Read this new bio for extra, extra credit.
  
• I see my local Portland Art Museum has the significant collection of Clement Greenberg's catalogs and private art collection. Wow.
• Official CG site.

Work in progress. Although I know there is already a Squidoo Lens on Pollock, I see room for more definition. My own spin. The opportunities are to illustrate it properly (without stepping on toes) and to lay out the format well. Any ideas?

Heroic Art Ideas

Abstract/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976, is open at The Jewish Museum from May 4th through September 21st, 2008. The famous action painters were chronicled, commended and enshrined by the art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The way Peter Schjeldahl has it in the current issue of The New Yorker, the real action figures may have been Greenberg and Rosenberg. See what you think.

Coming soon to The Colorist:
The Jackson Pollock Researcher. My hits on the subject of JP are so numerous, I will serve humanity by posting the catch all, end-all collection of Pollock links.

Late Breaking Rausch Up

Robert Rauschenberg
Detail of Erased de Kooning Drawing 1953
Collection SFMOMA and Rauschenberg estate

Here's my round up of the late Robert Rauschenberg buzz. The following will be the most comprehensive linkage to the esteemed man's obituaries, reviews and articles that you have seen.

My first impression anytime a famous contemporary artist passes from the scene is, "good on him for making it big and living an artist's life." Then, if I am at all curious, I read up on the subject and (graciously) pass my own judgment on their corpus. That means the work.

Rauschenberg is counted among the Pop Artists. They being the ones who supplanted the Abstractionists.

The story that sticks with me is Robert going over to de Kooning's studio with a bottle of liquor under one arm, and asking for a self portrait of the great Abstract Expressionist. Willem de Kooning says, "I know what you're doing," and graciously gives up the charcoal and graphite portrait. The young acolyte takes the art and erases it. It takes much effort and many erasers to destroy the master's work, and the point is well taken.

Links:

Rauschenberg defends his erasing of de Kooning (You Tube).
Tyler Green's incomplete round up.
Jen Graves
Regina Hackett
Roger Kimball
Is it okay to take a shot at the newly deceased artist? Kimball does, which rounds out this round up.

Thoughts & Links on Abstract Expressionism & Color Field Painting

Yellow Gesture

18" x 11"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
CTA

The popularity of the Abstract Expressionist movement continues today. Although the conventional wisdom wishes to move on, the movement has legs beyond it's supposed demise.

In the light of this, I wish to ask a couple of questions. Why would an artist today wish to identify their work as Abstract Expressionist, when it is considered defunct? Is it actually experiencing a rebirth, then? Do contemporary artists "give a care," as the vernacular has it, whether a movement is alive or dead in order to be associated with it?

Are these contemporaries the ultimate nerds of the art world? Or, are they just blithely ignorant of conventional wisdom, and happy to make art as they please?

My own references to the Abstract Expressionists have been many:

• Helen Frankenthaler (sorry, but I associate you with this school broadly)
  
• Clyfford Still
• Cy Twombly
• Jackson Pollock
• Mark Rothko
• Wolf Kahn ("second generation")
• Lee Krasner

Here are some current blogs closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement:

• David Novak
  
• Pollocks the Bollocks

On a related fresh note, the Smithsonian is loving the Color Field movement right now (through may 26th):

• Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975
• Hue-phoria

Speaking of color field work, Peter Plagens, at Newsweek, wonders what ever happened to color in contemporary art? Oh please, Palgens! Click on Google and find me, for heaven's sake! If you'd do a little research, you'd see that it is alive and kicking in the New School Color theme.

• A Room with a Hue (MoMA)

Thanks, Martha Marshall, for the Novak link.

Helen Frankenthaler

Photo: Lieberman, Alexander

Here is a link to a new exhibition of one of my Abstract Expressionists, Helen Frankenthaler. It's at the Ameringer-Yohe Gallery currently.

Her school of art was known by some as Post Painterly Abstraction. Whatever. She painted in New York, she knew Jackson Pollock, she studied with Hans Hofmann, end of story. I will still place her in Abstract Expressionism, at least until I write my doctoral thesis on schools of art.

The following wisdom from Frankenthaler should be burned in your heart if you want to be an artist who paints well and freely:

"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." (In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)

I will not post any paintings of hers, since she still holds rights to them. Here is some link love about the master:

CONNECTED BY JOY, 1967-70, via the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.
Wikipedia entry on HF.
Googleography (my own word for a list of books on Google).
What amounts to a resume on HF at World Wide Art Resources.
Bio from the NGA.

Rothko-ized

I have become Rothko-ized! Now, I am a fully functioning zombie in the Mark-Mode.

Just kidding. I will be "out of pocket", as the hip people say, for the next three weeks. On the road for Bellevue, Park City and Sun Valley. Reports will be posted at
the Endless Summer Art Fair.

You are owed a better end to the Rothko study. Sorry, I'm not ready for the definitive post, yet. I will have some down time between driving stretches, and maybe I'll get to post a little.

The quick things I can share are my pre-conclusions. Greenberg and that whole gang (including MR) were so impressed with abstraction being the break-out style for modern art that they felt they needed to push it to it's absolute limits. I'm not sure if we have reached those limits, yet. The cracks in that infrastructure developed before the Abstract Expressionist school could run its course.

I disagree with the dialectic that insists abstraction is the end-game of art. There are some solid values to abstraction, and it is fundamental to art as a historic continuum, and as a rudimentary part of the formal structure of art itself. I love the stuff, personally.

Rothko was a huge figure on the American landscape, whose color field art did a better job of breaking away from figuration than Pollock's art, IMHO. Not to compare too much, but the lack of line and the forwarding of the element of color are why I say MR is better. Action painting, as absolutely fantastic as it is, is still very dependent (Pollock's work) on the line.

Let's see. Now that I've dug this big hole, I guess I'll have a fine job ahead of me to fill in the rationales! I don't want to leave you with a comparison between JP and MR. That's too far off the mark for understanding the Abstract Expressionists.

Let's leave you with this awesome photo of The Irascibles, a group of artists otherwise known as the Abstract Expressionists, or the New York School. I wanted to photoshop myself in there as an interviewer, but I didn't want a lawsuit from the photographer. Perhaps you'll just have to imagine that part.

Image of the Abstract Expressionists known as The Irascibles.http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/images/abstexp_irascibles_lg.jpeg
"The Irascibles" (photo by Nina Leen, 1950, for Life magazine) Front row, left to right: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst (son of Max Ernst), Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko. Middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin. Back row: Willem De Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne.

Note:
Want to know more about Hedda Sterne? Fascinating. She is the last surviving member of this famous photo.

Clyfford Still

The Denver Post has this on the current DAM installation about our Abstract Expressionist, Clyfford Still. The city of Denver will have a Still Museum, targeted opening: 2010.

http://www.clyffordstill.net/
The definitive site
http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/Still.html
An interactive bio on the old boy
http://www.clyffordstillmuseum.org/
the proto-museum of CS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyfford_Still
Worth a read. I discovered that he has a Spokane connection, which makes him a local boy, sort of
http://www.artandperception.com/2007/03/610.html
This research led me to a nifty art blog called Art and Perception
http://www.clyffordstillmuseum.org/news/NYT-200703-18.pdf
NYT article relating to a Time Capsule of Still's art-very unusual stuff

Untitled: Red, Gray, Blue

Untitled: Red, Gray, Blue
8" x 5"
Original Pastel
July 1st, 2007
Casey Klahn

Remember we were talking (in my post: Color Field Painting) about Rothko and the Abstract Expressionist's desire to take their art to the final or ultimate expression of art. The critic Clement Greenberg was an influential voice for the art movement that would take abstraction to absolute and near-absolute expression.

The Encyclopedia Britannica offers some insight here into Greenberg's reasoning for going whole hog into abstraction:

The intellectual justification for his approach had been articulated a few years earlier in two essays published in Partisan Review. "The Avant Garde and Kitsch" (1939) was a manifesto in which Greenberg made a sharp distinction between "true culture" and "popular art." He asserted that quality in a work of art had nothing to do with contemporary social and political values. "Retiring from the public altogether," he wrote, "the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing it and raising it to the expression of an absolute…." This was necessary, he argued, because of the ways in which modern society had debased high art into kitsch. In "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (published in Partisan Reviewin [sic] 1940) Greenberg explained the necessity for avant-garde artists to break away from the traditional dominance of subject matter and place a new emphasis on form.

We're still emphasizing form, or formal qualities of art, today. I was talking with another artist the other day who takes after Andrew Wyeth, and he was extolling the abstract values in all styles of painting that succeed. My friend, Stan Miller, was saying that one of the great artist's patrons insists on hanging a large Wyeth upside down. The abstract composition is that good, even though it's a "realist" work.

Color Field Painting

Untitled: Red, Gray, Violet
5.5" x 4"
Original Pastel
June 20, 2007
Casey Klahn

This is one of my recent Rothko responses. I did another two this morning (photos are pending).

Let me share the following quote from our author:

"Art therefore is a generalization. The use of the plastic elements (editor: the artist's tools) to any other ends, which are most usually particularizations and descriptions of appearances, or which serve the stimulation of separate senses, are not in the category of art and must be classified in the category of the applied arts." Mark Rothko

Rothko indicates that abstraction is the ultimate end "type" of art, which is a main theme in Abstract Expressionism. Obviously, art has moved on from then (the Forties and Fifties through roughly the early Seventies), and artists are producing realist work again. We'll get into DeKooning later, who had to explain to his peerage why he went back to the figure instead of pure non-figurative abstraction. Link here to Wiki on abstraction, and here to ArtLex definition, which you must scroll or page to under the letter "a".

Anytime you say that "thus and such" is the last word on something, you get into trouble. I don't blame the AEs for looking for the ultimate definition of art, since the urge to be your best is what takes even artists to the top of their field. Certainly that happened for this group of American painters in the post-war years.

And, since they insisted on being "of the age", they did feel apocalyptic overtones to their time. Think: Atom Bomb. Pollock brought that up in a famous quote, and the times also were influenced by the overwhelming and then-present effects of the Second World War. Of course they needed an end-all art, since maybe they were in an end time.

But, when you get over the apocalyptic hump, you return to the studio and make some art. Will it be realist, or abstract? There are shades of each, and abstraction can be at the level of the idea, not just the subject or style of a painting. Today we live in a post-abstract world, where new things have to be created for art to flourish. Is there something new for abstractionists to say? I think so. What about realists. Of course there are new things to say!

William Lehman has a good brief on the whole mess at his post: Design VS Art.

Links:
http://www.artlex.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art
http://www.artisthideout.com/design-vs-art/

Rothko Response Revisit

Untitled,
6.5" x 4"
Original Pastel
10 June 2007
Casey Klahn

Here's a "bump" of this one, taken with the D80 instead of scanned. I have completed a few other Rothko responses which I'll be posting over the next few days.

Still wrestling with the great artist's philosophy (Mark Rothko). Amazon solicited a review today, since I bought it from them. How slow can I be?

Actually, I'm getting up at 4:30 AM these days in order to get some studio time before the "Daddy Day Care" opens at shortly after 7. Maybe the old guy's art philosophy is starting to sink in, after all.

Art of This Century

What I Bought Myself in Seattle

After reading a very interesting post on Rothko, links and all, I am getting more and more Rothko-ized by the day. Because I want to create a few really excellent posts, I'll be taking a little time to write them well. Be patient, dear readers.

In the meantime, I'd like to share with you the recent addition to my art library:
Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler, The Story of Art of This Century, by Davidson, Rylands, editors. Link. AOTC was the famous gallery that Peggy Guggenheim established in the Forties and where she was instrumental in launching the careers of many (if not all) of our Abstract Expressionists. Kiesler was the architect of the far out gallery space that became a hang-out for the avant-garde of the art world.

I had the strange experience of (unknowingly) visiting the location of the famous gallery at 20 West 57th Street in NYC. The actual place (Washburn Gallery ?) is a story or two above the Ameringer-Yohe Gallery, where I went to pay hommage to Wolf Kahn's pastels. During the same trip I bought a book at the MoMa that identified the location's place in history, and I thought about the serendipity of my chance visit.

Untitled

Mark Rothko,
apparently without a cigarette in his hand.

Welcome to Katherine's readers. We have been spending a great deal of time on the Abstract Expressionists, who are a major influence on my own art. Jackson Pollock came first (complete with movie review) and we are still in the middle of studying Mark Rothko.

The Rothko book from the grave has been a terrific influence on me . It has helped to widen my own philosophy of art. I'll need a little more time to be able to write about it though. In the meantime, I refer you to the best review of the book that I've read by Sheldon Nodelman in Art in America.
A quote from Nodelman:

Art and philosophy, for Rothko, are parallel enterprises, the only two human activities that aim to articulate a totalizing representation of human reality. They alone have the full capacity to "generalize"--a term of great significance to Rothko--i.e., to ascend from particular experiences toward universal truths. For Rothko this reality was dual-natured, objective and subjective, embracing equally both the circumstances of the world in themselves and the human experience of and imaginative response to them. The artist's mission is to reduce all experience, external and internal, to its essential unity. Rothko insists on the need to keep this goal firmly in view and to differentiate between true art--an activity defined by artistic intention--and its pseudomorphs proliferating in the contemporary world, all those appropriations of its techniques and languages for merely instrumental ends that we now call "visual culture."

Links:

The Artist's Reality, Rothko
Abstract Expressionism Timeline, Met Museum
Book Review, Nodelman
Front Page of Art in America Magazine

Response to Rothko

Untitled,
6.5" x 4"
Original Pastel
10 June 2007
Casey Klahn

This is a response to my Rothko research. I'd like to do more of these.

I know it looks moody to some, but you have to remember that my personal response to gray is 180 degrees opposite yours. I grew up under a cloud, you see. Gray is my comfort color!

When thinking Rothko, I think of Myth and Tragedy. Those were two of his benchmark meanings for art.