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Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Mark Rothko was among the founders of the New York School that extraordinary ensemble of artists who rose gradually to international pre- eminence in the decade following World War II. Rothko’s contributions to that movement the paintings for which he became well known consist of a few broad rectangles superposed and centered on large tall can- vases. In their fundamental simplicity their symmetry and flatness Roth- ko’s characteristic pictures have an austere iconic presence. The planarity of the paintings and the stillness that follows from their symme- try are mediated however by the visible directness of the artist’s brush and the nuanced painterly surfaces he coaxed with it. The effect of Roth- ko’s images as realized with his eloquent coloring can be at once mon- umental and subtle stunning and gradual. So elementary are his pictures that they can seem at once commanding and unassuming as their mag- isterial presence is bound up in an unsettling and affecting way with their haunting suggestioris of emptiness or absence. The atmosphere adduced by Rothko’s pictures by this poignant con- junction of presence and absence strikes a deep chord in many viewers evoking emotions and associations that have often been described in mystical spiritual or religious terms. “Rothko: Art as Religious Faith” is how Hilton Kramer headlined a review in the New York Times of the ma- jor Rothko retrospective exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in 1978 and a correspondent from the London Financial Times concurred that seeing the show “was like nothing so much as going to church.” The fact that he had accepted a commission to create a cycle of paintings for a chapel to be built in Houston Texas probably encouraged such re- sponses but “Rothko’s art was always putting people in mind of chap- els” as Lawrence Alloway observed; and the use of religious and mystical terminology in relation to his work long predated that project which was only completed at the end of his life. Art Digest’s staff re- viewer referred to “the vaporous mystical Mark Rothko” in 1950 for in- stance and John Canaday was writing in 1961 that “the weightiness of the color and the hugeness of the surrounding rectangles” in Rothko’s pictures “suggest the ritual symbols of a harsh and primitive religion. (LL)