Russian Jew

I don't usually mention politics but the ridiculous 'conference' on the Holocaust in Iran by that monkey makes me wonder just how thick a human being can be (in thickness I include a lack of ethical values). Looking forward to Jimmy Carter's book on Palestine...

For Jonah and C: Robert Hughes on Rothko:

Patience, patience
Patience in the blue!
Each atom of silence
Is the chance of a ripe fruit.

"... This obsession with the qualities of light, issuing from motionless emblems which are themselves fixed in a completely frontal pictorial structure, exactly repeats procedures of American Luminism and its 'small, still voices' of inner contemplation..the idea of a deity that was a 'great, luminous, oblong blur'. "

"He was a Russian Jew, obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meanings-the patriarchal weight , in fact, of the Old Testament."

On the Rothko chapel:
"all the world has drained out of them, leaving only a void. Whether it is 'the Void' glimpsed by mystics , or simply an impressively theatrical emptiness, is not easily determined. ..In effect it is the last silence of Romanticism..art, in a convulsion of pessimistic inwardness, is meant to replace the world."


All the artists… agreed to hate the image. The art of the new man must suppress all representation of man. Malevich, an eloquent if erratic propagandist, thundered against the Venus de Milo ('not a woman but a parody') and against the 'rubbish filled pool of Academic art' with its female hams, depraved cupids and congealed legacy from Greece. His tone is that of Isaiah on the subject of idols and I think the comparison apt. For beneath the Russians' obvious devotion to human images lurks an impulse to smash them to bits. The ugly riches of late Tsardom, it is true, were an open invitation to the wreckers, but iconoclasm in Russia has a longer history.

As 'Third Rome' and guardian of an orthodoxy denied by the renegade West, Russia inherited from Byzantium her peculiar attitude towards the image. The statue of an emperor or icon of a saint proved the legitimacy of a political or religious idea. The saying 'He who delights in the Emperor's statue delights in the Emperor' applies as well to Justinian as to Tsar Nicholas II Authoritarian societies love images because they reinforce the chain of command at all levels of the hierarchy. But an abstract art of pure form and colour, if it is serious and not merely decorative, mocks the pretensions of secular power because it transcends the limits of this world and attempts to penetrate a hidden world of universal law.

Anarchic peoples, like desert nomads, hate and destroy images, and a similar image-breaking streak runs through Russian history…

Malevich was touched by mystical yearnings. In his hands the non-objective canvas became an icon of anarchy and inner freedom: this is what made it dangerous to Marxist materialism. Of his painting Black Square he said he had felt 'black nights within' and a timidity bordering on fear', but as he decided to break with reality and abandon the image: 'a blissful sensation of being drawn into a "desert" where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.' Now this is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart – or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich's Black Square, his 'absolute symbol of modernity', is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka'aba at Mecca, the shrine in the valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God. And if this seems far-fetched, I quote the judgement of Andrei Burov, an architect who left the Constructivist Movement: 'There was a strong Muslim influence and orthodox Mohammedanism at that; by way of decoration only clocks and letters were allowed.'

excerpt from "George Costakis: The Story of an Art Collector in the Soviet Union," in What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin

Celeste says,
Rothko himself said, in conversation with Selden Rodman: 'I'm NOT an abstractionist.'Selden: 'You're an abstractionist to me.. You're a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumenal scale. Do you deny that?'Rothko: 'I do..... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions -trajedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of peple break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate these basic emotions. .. People who weep in front of my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, {meaning Selden}, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
'The above is taken from Seldon's Conversations With Artists.(First published in 1957.)

Seldon also spoke with Rothko's great friend, the Japanes artist Kenzo Okada, who said, among other things: 'Like Cezanne, like Matisse, [Mark's] pictures [are] always changing, meaning different things to different people. This is not true of Rouault or Picasso.'Looking at Rothkos's paintings, arouses those same 'mystical yearnings'that one experiences when contemplating the geometrical art of Islam, which have no iconographic meaning but makes its appeal direct to the spirit (or whatelse?). In his Introduction to Keith Critchlow's Islamic Pattern, Seyyed Hossein Nasr says:'The doctrine of unity which is cental to the Islamic revelation combined with the nomadic spirituality which Islam made its own brought into being an aniconic art wherein the spiritual world was reflected in the sensible world not through various iconic forms but through geometry and rhythm, through arabesques and calligraphy which reflect directly the worlds above and ultimately the suprenal sun of Divine Unity.'

I won't pretend to understand the full implication of Nasr's words, but want simply to convey the idea that work like Rothko's evokes a passionate response which is beyond words and which taps into the sort of deep levels of awareness which I sense in Islamic geometrical art.