Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In his discussion of Mark Rothko James Breslin examines a very differ- ent aspect of the painful and perplexing issue of what may or may not be represented. Rothko was insistent that his works were not in some way ‘images’ of something absent and to suggest this he referred to them as ‘presences’ indicating plenitude and vitality in what is apparently empty. Figure painting was rejected by Rothko because he believed that artists could not use the figure without mutilating it and his canvases are a form of representation that permits a sense of wholeness of fullness and com- pletion a sense as Breslin points out of representing the state of being before language before even the recognition of separateness from the mother a state of ‘not-yet-me. Breslin discusses this in terms of the child’s earliest relation with a nurturing mother a relationship which Rothko’s paintings re-evoke by their large and seductive ‘presence’; this presence breaks down boundaries between painting and viewer engulfing the viewer in a process both enveloping and discomforting.