How Vandalizing the Tate Rothko Is Desecrating a Grave

Upon hearing news of the vandalizing of Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting Black on Maroon (shown above), a part of me cried out in pain. Few artists cut to the core of what it is to be a human being as Rothko, as testified by the enduring appeal of his paintings, which remain as hypnotic and personal as they were when he took his life more than 40 years ago. A vandal calling himself Vladimir Umanets tells the BBC that he attacked the Tate’s prize painting not as a vandal but as an “artist” carrying on the mission of Duchamp under the theoretical banner of “Yellowism.” Vladimir Umanets, whose name (thanks to Holly Knowlman’s detective work on the Yellowism Facebook page) is an anagram for “I’m true vandalism,” demonstrates “Yellowism” only as a sign of cowardice—an individual or group masquerading as an art movement by damaging the works of the past. Tagging Black on Maroon with a graffiti pen, however, isn’t just art vandalism. In this case, it’s the desecration of a grave. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Vandalizing the Tate Rothko Is Desecrating a Grave."


[Image: Mark Rothko. Black on Maroon, 1958.]

CSI: Renaissance Italy

Who killed Caravaggio? Or what killed Caravaggio? Four hundred years later, who cares? To “celebrate” the 400th anniversary of the demise of the demented genius of the Renaissance, Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage looks to answer these questions once and for all. According to a report from Reuters, a team from the departments of Anthropology and Cultural Heritage Conservation at the universities of Ravenna and Bologna will play a different kind of tomb raiders in search of Caravaggio’s remains. The process, however, which sounds more convoluted than an episode of CSI, would challenge even Gus Grissom’s team. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "CSI: Renaissance Italy."

Playing the Part

What must life really have been like with Vincent Van Gogh? Born March 30, 1853, Van Gogh tried the patience of everyone from his father to his devoted brother Theo to his one-time friend Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh’s tragic life can be played for pathos or even for laughs, however unintended. The best biography of Van Gogh’s life and thoughts is found in the letters, but even they have been subject to “creative” misreading, most notably in the novelization of those letters by Irving Stone in Lust for Life. In 1955, Kirk Douglas (above) played Vincent in the movie version of Stone’s novel, which was also titled Lust for Life. The highly physical actor Douglas played Vincent as a highly physical artist, full of passionate intensity and a lively body. Douglas portrays Vincent with an almost preternatural belief in his own abilities, even when doubt seems a sensible course. I find it fascinating how different actors have tackled Van Gogh over the years. In many ways, Van Gogh the film character has become the Hamlet of art history acting, with different actors emphasizing different elements of the real-life artist’s persona. Douglas depicts Vincent brimming with self-confidence. Van Gogh certainly needed to armor himself against doubt to persevere, but I don’t get the sense from the letters that he never harbored any doubts about his choices.

In 1990, Tim Roth (above) played Vincent in Vincent & Theo, with Paul Rhys taking on the role of Theo. As obvious from the title of the film, Roth’s Vincent is seen primarily through his relationship with Theo. In contrast to Douglas’ rugged portrayal, the slightly built Roth plays a more needy and literally hungry Vincent. In Vincent & Theo we get more of a sense of the weaknesses of Vincent that Theo had to address, which ultimately led to Theo’s own death shortly after Vincent’s suicide. Douglas’ Vincent is the typical hero of 1950s American movies—the bold individual paddling mightily against the current of conventional wisdom. Roth’s Vincent is a more complex psychological character, reflecting the art house sensibilities of 1980s and 1990s movies. Of course, by the time Roth plays Vincent, the story of Van Gogh’s tribulations was well worn territory, so plumbing the psychological depths, indeed the doubts that Douglas glossed over, presented almost virgin territory.


Perhaps the most disturbing depiction of Vincent Van Gogh was that of Andy Serkis as part of Simon Schama’s in Power of Art series in 2006. Fresh from playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies, Serkis plays a more obsessed, more disturbed Vincent. If Douglas embodied power and Roth embodied frailty, Serkin beautifully embodies the fever pitch of all-consuming obsession. Just as Gollum loses his humanity in a single-minded quest for the ring, Serkin’s Vincent seemingly loses some of his humanity thanks to a similar kind of tunnel vision, in this case for a new vision in art. The scene in which Serkin eats paint straight from the tube (something the real Vincent actually did during his lowest points of mental illness) is simply harrowing and deeply illustrative of the anguish of the real Vincent. Each of these actors stressed a single facet of a multi-faceted personality. None of them could possibly capture Vincent whole, and even collectively they merely scratch the surface. What must life really have been like with Vincent Van Gogh? We can only guess—perhaps a little better thanks to these actors. But life with Vincent certainly must have been a constant parade of extremes. We can get a taste of those extremes through his art today, and maybe that’s all we’re meant to bear.

Pressing the Flesh

Did anyone ever make marble look more convincingly like warm flesh than Gian Lorenzo Bernini? Born December 7, 1598, Bernini sculpted the magnificent Rape of Proserpina (above) from 1620 to 1621. As Proserpine resists Pluto, pushing his shaggy head away, Pluto’s fierce fingers press into the flesh of her leg and leave indentations. Touching sculptures in museums, especially something almost four centuries old, is verboten, but I always wondered what it would be like to touch this sculpture and feel the chill of the marble when my eyes clearly register the warmth of human flesh. With such works, Bernini announced his claim to Michelangelo’s title as the greatest sculptor of the human form.


Bernini took on Michelangelo directly in creating his version of David (above, from 1623-1624). Whereas Michelangelo’s David assumes a pose of complete classical composure as the confident future king, Bernini’s David sweats and strains in a gesture of pure torque and tension. Bernini’s David captures a sense of movement and effort that Michelangelo’s figure lacks in its effortless cool. Both Davids capture different aspects of the Biblical figure and represent their creators and their times equally well. Michelangelo’s David stood for a Florence and Italy that needed a symbol of pride to rally around. Bernini’s David stood for a nation and a church that knew it had some work to do.


With The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (above, from 1647-1652), Bernini made a cosmic leap in the world of religious sculpture. Religious and sexual ecstasy blur together in the expression of the saint as the rays of glory penetrate her soul. Simon Schama’s The Power of Art looked long and hard at St. Theresa’s moment of ecstasy, which marks a high point of the Counter-Reformation re-selling of Catholicism to the masses, now with the added element of sex to spice up the story. Schama does a good job of acting coy about the sexuality of this figure, but that eroticism is as obvious to us today as it was to the uneducated masses of the seventeenth century. Bernini worked hard to obtain the favor of the rich and powerful, which meant in most cases the Catholic Church hierarchy and those surrounding it. The fact that sex sells was as true then as it is today.

Incredulity

Do you know anyone who does not love the work of Caravaggio, born on this date in 1573? Today, we stand before his works dumbfounded by their intensity and psychological insight, probing with our eyes to unlock their secrets like St. Thomas probing the wound in Christ’s side above in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas (above, from 1601-1602). How is it possible that Caravaggio’s work, so influential during his lifetime, fell into obscurity after his death until the early twentieth century? Hard to believe, but true. Even David Hockney’s accusations of Caravaggio “cheating” with a camera obscura can’t break the spell, at least for me, of his paintings’ power.

Caravaggio calls to us from the shadows of history, much like Christ calling St. Matthew to follow him in Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew (above, 1599-1600). The details of Caravaggio’s life remain murky, thanks to his unorthodox lifestyle, frequent travels, and lack of letters or journals. Because of this documentary void, scholars have to rely on the masterpieces he left in his wake and, unfortunately, his frequent run-ins with the law. Simon Schama’s The Power of Art portrayed Caravaggio as a swashbuckling madman, letting his sword do the talking for the most part. In his silence, Caravaggio seems even more timeless, able to slip noiselessly from his generation to ours as easily as the characters in The Calling of St. Matthew slip anachronistically into late 17th century Italian clothing.

Even if Caravaggio “cheated” with painting aids (and I think that’s a huge “if”), there’s no way he could have “cheated” in creating such psychologically astute characters. Figures such as those in The Sacrifice of Isaac (above, from 1601-1602) live and breathe and give life to the old Bible stories—greater sermons than most clerics could possibly present. What an eye Caravaggio must have had to walk to the streets and find the grizzled old men and beautiful yet hardened prostitutes that would become saints and madonnas. When Caravaggio painted the Virgin Mary in his The Death of the Virgin using sketches he had made of a notorious prostitute moldering in the town morgue, he created the understandable stir, but the people couldn’t argue with the results.

One of the highlights of the Vatican Museum’s galleries for me was seeing Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ (above, from 1602-1603). Surrounded by contemporary works by the Caravaggisti, those painters from all over Europe who saw and almost instantly imitated Caravaggio’s style, The Entombment stands above all the rest. Not until critics such as Roberto Longhi and Bernard Berenson rediscovered Caravaggio in the early twentieth century did he reclaim his rightful place in the art pantheon. Caravaggio’s work is so intertwined with Catholicism in my mind that I find it hard to believe that he was ever out of fashion. Michelangelo captures the soaring beauty of Catholicism for me, the muscular nudes pointing to the zenith of humanity as a reflection of God’s own image. Caravaggio, on the other hand, remains on the ground, toiling with the sinners and the soiled saints in the shadows, rising up into the light bit by bit, reminding us that for every soaring moment of Michelangeloesque grandeur in Christianity, there are countless moments of earthly pain and struggle as hard and real and, ultimately, as conquerable as the tomb's lid in The Entombment.

Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and So On

“[I’m] only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” Mark Rothko once wrote. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” Born Marcus Rothkowitz on September 25, 1903 in Latvia, Rothko created works such as Untitled (Orange and Yellow) (above, from 1956) that reach directly into your heart, emotionally and aesthetically. Rothko’s multiform pictures, large unframed canvases full of giant bodies of color bleeding into one another, command and envelop a room. Many people see only an emptiness in these blocks of color, or just interesting composition. For those who allow their minds and hearts to ponder the range of feeling within them, Rothko becomes a religious experience.

The struggles that play out on Rothko’s multiforms mirror the struggles of his life. After suffering through the Russian pograms of his youth, his family moved to America in 1913. Mastering his new language of English (his fourth), Rothko excelled at school and earned a scholarship to Yale, leaving after one year. Rothko felt drawn to spiritual artists such as Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, and the German Expressionists before meeting fellow philosophical artist Barnett Newman in the 1930s. Through his conversations with Newman and his readings of Freud, Jung, Nietsche, and J.G. Frazer, Rothko developed an idiosyncratic view of myth and symbolism that he expressed in works such as The Omen of the Eagle (above), from 1942. But even those ancient symbols seemed unsatisfying in his mission to express those elusive “basic human emotions.”

Simon Schama’s episode on Rothko in The Power of Art series focuses on his 1958 Seagram Murals at the Tate Museum (one of which appears above). In these murals and other late works, such as those which eventually became the Rothko Chapel, Rothko achieved a nearly transcendent use of color and form approximating pure emotion and, perhaps, religious epiphany. Applying the paint to these images became such a demanding experience for Rothko that many of his later works were actually painted by assistants under his direction as his health began to fail. This intensity of his art may have contributed to his suicide in 1970. Schama’s treatment of Rothko presented his works in this cosmic intensity, pulling away from the murals and melding them into a vision of the starry heavens, as if they were doorways to another dimension. The Seagram Murals, with their square frame motifs, open the door to Rothko’s mind and philosophy and call us to join him in a voyage of self-discovery like few other artists can.

Rock the Vote

Thanks to everyone who took part in the first Art Poll by Bob asking which episode of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art was “the most powerful” for you. At the end of August, the clear winner was Van Gogh (6 votes), trailed by Rembrandt and Turner (3 votes each), with David (2 votes) and Caravaggio (1 vote) bringing up the rear. I’m going to chalk up the light response to late Summer vacations and the fact that a large portion of my readership consists of non-television-owning intellectuals (hah!).

But with September, I’ve decided to really rock the vote and ask the musical question: What is your favorite art- or artist-related song? I’ve come up with a list to satisfy the young, the old, and the in-between, with dueling Monas, too:

Andy Warhol by David Bowie

Mona Lisa by Nat King Cole

Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) by Don McLean

Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War by Paul Simon

Mona Lisa by Britney Spears

So, whether you have a soft spot for Van Gogh (the defending champion) or think that Britney (above, in simpler times, with a friend) might still make a comeback (to sanity, perhaps), let your voice be heard and cast your vote today.

Monster’s Ball

Of all the segments of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art, the episode covering Jacques-Louis David may have shaken me the most. Standing before The Death of Marat (above), David's propaganda piece martyrizing Jean-Paul Marat, Schama looks into the camera and says, “Do I like David? I don’t. He’s a monster.” David, born on this date in 1748, dazzles with the power of his images, and that is the key to his monstrosity and his seductiveness. With David begins the modern concept of propaganda in all its most destructive uses by the powerful over the powerless.

When I was too young to know better, David always struck me as one of those ideal painters, taking ideals and ideas and making them live through art. Even after I was old enough to know better, I found myself standing before such works as The Oath of the Horatii (above, from 1784) and feeling myself getting suckered in by the classical ideals of Dulce et decorum est, without Wilfred Owen’s caustic codicil. Part of me wishes that the power of art could be harnessed for the furthering of ideals, but a more savvy part of me realizes that such power is too easily misappropriated. The path from David’s Oath of the Horatii to his contemporary depiction of The Tennis Court Oath to The Triumph of the Will to costume parades on aircraft carrier decks is a short one ideologically, regardless of the passage of time.

And, yet, I always held out hope that the monster inside David would always lose out to the angel that could paint works such as Madame Recamie (above), which floored me with its balance and classical poise when I saw it in the flesh at the Louvre, which exists today in no small part due to the early efforts of David to create a national museum for France. Questions of morality aside, you can’t ever accuse David of coming up short in person, unlike so many other painters known just through reproductions. The warmth of his Portrait of Monsieur Lavoisier and his wife (1788) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York almost makes me forget how David contributed to the excesses of the French Revolution that exploded into “The Reign of Terror” that cost the Lavoisiers and so many others their lives. Do I like David? I have to say, no, too. Do I wish I could? That’s a different question.

Polls Remain Open

If you watched and loved Simon Schama’s The Power of Art, please take a moment to vote for your favorite episode in the poll to the right. Polls close at the end of August. It’s still anyone’s race, so rock the vote and participate. No lines, plenty of attractive candidates, and no hanging chads–how could it be simpler? And no purple fingers, either.

Get Out the Vote

Blogger has introduced a new gadget that allows bloggers to feature polls on their sites. I’ve set up a poll in the right-hand column of the screen as the first of what I’d like to make a monthly feature. At the end of each month, I’ll report the results and set up a new poll.

This first poll asks which episode of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art did you find “the most powerful”? I’ll let you define most powerful for yourself. For me, it’s a really tough call. Each episode had a lot to offer, as you would expect any Schama production would. Having read Schama’s books, I could see how he took those tomes and condensed them into an hour of incredible television: Rembrandt’s Eyes made Rembrandt shine; Citizens infused David with incredible historic detail; and Rough Crossings helped Schama capture the pathos and drama of the slave industry found in Turner’s masterpiece. Andy Serkis’ performance as Van Gogh, however, totally blew me away, bringing Vincent to life more believably than Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life ever did. All that being said, the Caravaggio, Bernini, Picasso, and Rothko installments weren’t shabby, either. (Unfortunately, Blogger seems to be limiting me to only five options for the poll, so I had to make some cuts before the final poll. Consider them the primaries.)

So, if you watched, take a moment and make your voice heard in my little experiment in art history democracy.

The Sadness Will Last Forever

I usually don’t commemorate anniversaries of deaths here, but I’ll make an exception for an exceptional painter. On this date in 1890, just days after painting Wheatfield With Crows (above), Vincent Van Gogh goes walking in that same field, steps behind a haystack, and shoots himself in the chest. Amazingly, Van Gogh struggles back to his room at a nearby inn, telling no one of what he had done. When the innkeeper finally discovers Van Gogh’s condition, he calls for Dr. Gachet, Vincent’s physician and friend. (Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet is below.) Gachet realizes the severity of Van Gogh’s condition and sends word to Vincent’s brother, Theo. Theo arrives the next afternoon at Vincent’s bedside. “The sadness will last forever,” Vincent tells his brother as death approaches. Vincent dies at 1:30 am on July 29, 1890. The Catholic church at Auvers refuses to bury Vincent because he has committed suicide (the standard practice at the time), so they move him to nearby Mery, where he is buried on July 30th.



In retrospect, we can see the desperation and agitation of Van Gogh’s mind in his Wheatfield With Crows. As Simon Schama remarks during the Van Gogh chapter of The Power of Art, we don’t know if the crows, black as death against the throbbing blue sky and golden wheat swaying in the wind, are coming or going, attacking or leaving. Is this Van Gogh foreshadowing his own death in the approaching crows or overoptimistically trying to drive the self-destructive impulses away? Similarly, in retrospect, we read in the portrait of Dr. Gachet the sadness and, perhaps, frustration he felt over Van Gogh’s demise. Despite his best efforts and those of Theo, Van Gogh couldn’t evade his destiny. I remember reading years ago the poet A. Alvarez’s book on suicide titled The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, where he wrote that “[s]uicide has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out… One of the most remarkable features of the arts in this century has been the sudden, sharp rise in the casualty-rate among the artists.” Alvarez knew the tragic arc of suicide quite well, having witnessed the final days of the poet Sylvia Plath, whose poems haunt us in the same way that Van Gogh’s paintings do. Van Gogh’s story should seem well-worn now, after so much retelling, but his life, letters, and works continue to fascinate us. To use Alvarez’s phrase, Van Gogh’s paintings are “a dye that cannot be washed out.” And to use Vincent’s own words, his story, with its resonance for us even today, is a sadness lasting forever.

Self-Portrait in Self-Portraits

Anyone who has been watching Simon Schama’s series The Power of Art on PBS here in the United States has been witness to some really amazing television. But perhaps the most powerful episode of that series was that featuring Rembrandt van Rijn, born on July 15, 1604. I’m not surprised at the quality of Schama’s coverage of Rembrandt considering how amazing his book Rembrandt’s Eyes was. As Schama points out in his program, Rembrandt remains a compelling figure because of the psychological depth of his works, especially his self-portraits—approximately 200 of which he did over his 65 years of life. The portrait above, from 1629, shows the 24-year-old hotshot just as he began to make a name for himself, taking lucrative commissions, opening up his own academy, and accepting students into his studio.

Schama offers the self portrait from 1640 (above) as evidence of Rembrandt’s salad days. He strikes a pose from a portrait by Titian, elevating himself to the status of art titan. Rembrandt covers himself in the finery of the wealthy, showing off the wealth that allowed him and his wife Saskia to start a family and move into a palatial home. Sadly, from this peak, Rembrandt soon begins his fall. In 1641, his only child to survive to adulthood, Titus, is born. Unfortunately, the toll on Saskia’s health is too great and she perishes in 1642. Rembrandt then begins his spiral into financial difficulty, difficult relationships with women, and a loss of popular and critical standing in the art world as he explores a new style of interior self-examination and leaves behind the stuff of surfaces and simple pieties that made his fortune and name.

This portrait from 1669, Rembrandt’s last year, shows him in all his weariness. The ravages of time appear in the topography of his face. His eyes shine with a somber introspection, as if looking into the future towards the acceptance his own time could never grant. When modern artists such as Picasso arrived at the point at which they needed to explore their own identity through the self-portrait, it was Rembrandt who provided the most powerfully honest example.

In addition to the sad self-portraits of his later years, Rembrandt increasingly examined the scenes of Christianity, bringing the same rugged, homely honesty of his self portrayals to his depictions of Christ. In contrast to the composed, almost serene visions of the crucifixion found in Renaissance art and elsewhere, Rembrandt’s scene at Golgotha swarms with the chaos of an execution, which it was. By including the two thieves in the scene and the title, Rembrandt invites all sinners to participate in the moment, bringing each viewer into the picture and removing all distance forged by time and degree. Just as Rembrandt’s self-portraits celebrate the human, in all its glory and weakness, his religious images celebrate the divine in all its glory and, paradoxically, its humanity.