
Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos - nsns
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/watching-them-turn-off-the-rothkos
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alayne
I really enjoyed seeing No. 14 at SFMOMA. Rothko's canvases are huge and there
is a real warmth to them due to being hand-painted oil on canvas. These murals
must have been a sight to see when they were in good condition.

A lot of abstract expressionist and other experimental art pieces suffer from
preservation issues, often due to unorthodox techniques and materials such as
thick application of paint. It's too bad because you can't properly perceive
the texture of real paintings and their sense of light and space when you look
at a small wikipedia photograph on a backlit monitor.

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alexandersingh
If you're around a Rothko, walk up to it until it fills your field of vision
and stare at it without blinking. Within several seconds you'll notice it
start to move as though it's alive.

I think that you can gain more out of art and, perhaps, a particular artist if
you understand their work in context. In this case, understanding what led to
Abstract Expressionism and how it influenced artistic development.

~~~
stan_rogers
One gets the same effect staring at a wall that _doesn 't_ have a Rothko
hanging on it. Or at a sufficiently large monitor with a static display.
Leveraging persistence of vision might make an interesting series, but when
it's the only trick the pony can do?

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alexandersingh
Oh I wasn't suggesting that it was unique to Rothko's paintings, though I
think it works particularly well with the dense color fields.

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nsns
There are some details here about the way they've been using computer
generated illumination: [http://theconversation.com/how-we-restored-harvards-
rothko-m...](http://theconversation.com/how-we-restored-harvards-rothko-
murals-without-touching-them-35245)

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douche
I know, I'm a philistine, but I have never understood the allure of Rothko
paintings. Yay, colors in big blocks... I appreciate the efforts of painters
who aspired to photo-realism in the age before cameras far more.

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MattGrommes
They really are different in real life if you've never seen them up close. As
I understand, Rothko wanted people to stand right in front of them for awhile,
to really have them take over your whole field of view. I never really "got"
them until I did that, I was always much more aligned with you.

As for photo realism, have you seen the movie "Tim's Vermeer"? It's a great
look at a possible technique for that and the movie is very interesting.

~~~
douche
There was a large Rothko mural at the school I went to for undergrad, and I
dated an artist who loved his work for several years. I remain unmoved.

On the other hand, in one visit to the Berlin Alte Nationaegallerie, I saw
paintings that I will never forget. "The Iron Rolling Mill", by Adolph Menzel,
"In the Troops Quarters outside Paris," by Anton von Werner. The Blinded
Samson. These are truly masterpieces, to my mind.

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TheOtherHobbes
The irony is they're not really photorealistic. If you took a photo of those
exact scenes you wouldn't get that look, because the light has been
deliberately abstracted and exaggerated.

They're actually more like vintage painted Instagrams, enhanced in an
unnatural way for effect.

E.g. The Menzel has obvious impressionist features, especially in the
background and the smoke around the ceiling. The von Werner has very weird
lighting, with a source behind the viewer, or possibly off to the left, or the
right, and another equally bright daylight source from the room behind.

This is not to be critical - they're both very good. But they both have
abstracted light and form, and neither is a pure representation of physical
realism.

If you want photorealism, Van Eyck pretty much nailed it in the 15th century.

Which is kind of the point with art - you get more points for inventing a new
visual language, not for copying an existing one.

That's why Picasso is so famous - he totally killed traditional representation
when he was starting out. But it was too easy and boring for him, so he moved
on to other kinds of painting and drawing.

Modernism is partly about violently stripping away non-essentials, so first we
had Guernica, then Rothko - and now we have Jony Ive and Material trailing
along at the end of the trend, before everyone rediscovers 3D about five years
from now.

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smikhanov
You are right about most things here, but I'll add a minor remark:
"photorealism" is an established term for describing paintings that have
certain characteristics of a photograph, for example, depth of focus. It's a
20th century movement and in strict cultural sense, Van Eyck is not
photorealistic (he sometimes was deliberately skewing perspective or objects
proportions). Instead, Gerhard Richter's "photo art" is an earlier example of
photorealism, Chuck Close is a later one.

The most interesting thing about photorealism is that it actually opened new
ways for painting, i.e. photography was used as a tool to better understand
visual perception.

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TheOtherHobbes
There's a difference between (photo)realism as a goal and Photorealism as a
modern school.

In art history, you won't often you find someone explaining what Estes, Close
and those guys from the 60s and 70s were trying to do without also seeing a
nod to Van Eyck and Vermeer.

