Lila Reid ’20 – Rothko

Mark Rothko’s oil on canvas painting (81 3/4 x 67 inches), “No. 18,” displayed at the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute as a part of its permanent collection, exemplifies the stylistic push away from representative art and towards abstraction in 20th century American art. The painting includes a salmon colored border, with the space within this border broken up into horizontal parts: the bottom component, taking up more than half of the composition, is a milky, pinkish white. The upper part of the painting is a deep orange-red hue, separated from the white by a thin red line. Above this red line is another, which contains layers of white, peach, red, and navy colors. From afar, these lines seem distinct and quite linear. However, upon closer inspection, the lines are not really lines at all—instead, they are a blending of colors, sometimes dripping, and in some areas, the colors indistinguishable from one another.

Just as other contemporary artists defy the previous traditions of the line, such as Jackson Pollock in his seemingly sporadic splatter paintings, Mark Rothko does the same, though in a different, more subtle way. He redefines the importance of lines—making them fuzzy and subtle, yet presenting them as the sole subject of the piece, rather than using them as tools to describe representative subjects. The soft, geometric forms he paints stand alone as something worth viewing and contemplating. The varying layers of paint also draw the eye across the canvas, engaging the viewer with every part of the painting. Rothko wanted to emphasize this in the display of his work—hanging his paintings without a frame in order to present his work purely on its own. “No. 18,” however, sits in a thin, white border (about three inches deep) for protection. Though not exactly a frame in the traditional sense, the border does create a shadow along the edge of the painting, thus eliminating the sensation that the colors spread from the canvas onto the wall itself. The scale of this piece, 81 3/4 x 67 inches, helps combat the effect of this border. Rothko’s choice of a large canvas and bright colors not only makes his painting both striking from afar, but also when approached.