THE IMPACT OF MARK ROTHKO’S LATER WORK ON THE WORKS OF

HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Nicholas Candela Contemporary Art History 701-Online

November 20, 2014

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Mark Rothko had been painting for well over twenty-five years before he arrived at his

now-iconic rectangular color-field compositions. Once identified as an “aesthetic rebel,” Rothko 1

and his subsequent paintings became a beacon for an artistic transformation and provided a new

direction for Abstract Expressionism. His paintings also influenced the Color Field painters, and

merge the values of Modernism with the Romantic notion of the sublime. Dore Ashton, a close

friend and art critic had written, “Rothko in the 1950s was prepared to go beyond symbolism to

sense the silences behind and beneath his every gesture on the canvas. The forms in his paintings

would still be like “actors”, but now they acted in a different drama in which anecdote disappears

into light.” The plastic spaces of Mark Rothko’s work from the late 1940s on had an immediate 2

impact on his contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, and have continued to influence

subsequent generations of artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose black and white images of lakes,

oceans, and seas rival the sublime spaces of Rothko.

Much of the work for which Rothko is most widely known is based on the rigid and

systematic investigation and de-construction of composition and color, and little more. Indeed,

these later works appear to have adhered to many of the basic tenets of Modernism, lacking

representation and seemingly devoid of any human element, invoking the requisite individual

aesthetic experience of the viewer.

In fact, it was this systematic exploration that eventually became the context for Rothko’s

work, with repetition and variety ultimately reflecting Rothko’s own obsession with an infinite

and plastic space as he sought time and again to prove the existential worth of his visually-

Glen Phillips and Thomas Crow, Seeing Rothko, (Los Angeles: Getty Pub., 2005), 16.1

Dore Ashton, About Rothko, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2003), 123.2

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commanding paintings. He often identified Aeschylus and Shakespeare, the great tragedians, as

influential in his own artistic development and at one point he even stated that “A painting is not

about experience, it is an experience.” However, where most Modernists purposefully avoided 3

any connotations of the spiritual, Rothko pursued them. Therefore it should be noted that while

his contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning were reading and reflecting on the likes of Carl

Jung and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rothko was not influenced by them, instead pre-occupying

himself with the works of the famed (albeit opposing) existentialists, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

Rothko had been working with variations of his now-famous rectangular color-field

compositions for more than fifteen years when he accepted, in 1958, an invitation to create a

series of paintings for a secluded dining room adjacent to The Four Seasons Restaurant inside the

Seagram Building in New York City. Initially Rothko embraced the project wholeheartedly, even

renting and modifying a new studio, a former YMCA basketball court, to mimic the interior of

the restaurant. However, several nuances of the restaurant space seemed to have escaped Rothko

in his planning, namely that the dining room was bordered on two sides by a large window and a

series of doors that opened into the larger restaurant. Having only a small row of windows near

the top of his 23 foot-tall studio space, Rothko, in his subsequent paintings, responded to this

enclosed, dark space rather than the open and lively atmosphere in which they were meant to

hang. This is not to say that the paintings were unsuccessful. As the German art historian and 4

critic Werner Haftmann commented when seeing the works in progress in Rothko’s studio space,

“…soon, we were encompassed by these darkening walls of light. It was a very spiritual

Ashton, About Rothko, 135.3

Borchardt-Hume, Rothko, 18. This phrase and the preceding two correspond to the author’s description 4

of Rothko’s new studio space, purchased exclusively for Seagram Commission.

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luminosity that emanated from these backgrounds.” From the beginning, Rothko’s new work 5

had such presence and conviction that it quickly became the very experience Rothko sought.

When we study one of Rothko’s earlier works from the series, such as No. 9 from 1958

(Fig. 1), we can see some of what Haftmann was referring to. First and foremost, at nearly nine

feet tall and over thirteen feet wide, the massive canvas asserts itself to the viewer; there are no

casual glances to be had. The vast horizontal orientation of the canvas is reinforced by three

bands of color that seem to emanate from the canvas fibers themselves, stretching across nearly

the entire format. Varying hues of red simultaneously collect and disperse, unifying the entire

surface of the painting, with the highest intensity of these occurring through the center, forcing

itself outward, imposing itself on the viewer. Meanwhile the black and white bands serve to

stabilize the field of red, but the white rectangle also generates, even radiates light while the

black shape slowly undulates forward and backward, aiding in the creation of an endless and

indeterminate space that envelopes and offers viewers an utterly existential experience.

Despite the presence of paintings such as No. 9, Rothko soon realized that he could

strengthen his work even further by balancing the horizontal nature of his bands of color with a

more vertical format, or at the very least by altering the manner in which a border is employed.

For example, in a painting from 1959, Mural for End Wall (Fig. 2), Rothko uses a frame of a

fiery red hue, inset within a field of a rich plum tone to create an interior vertical rectangle.

Again an exceptionally large painting at nearly nine feet square, the visual impact of Rothko’s

simple expression is unmatched. By allowing the framing device to be wider on the sides and

Borchardt-Hume, Rothko, 19.5

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narrower on the top and bottom, Rothko manipulates what is essentially a square format to create

the illusion of overall verticality. Additionally, the softer plum color that exists both at the edges

of the canvas and inside the central rectangle seems to be holding back, suppressing even the

light that emanates through the blaring red tone (notably painted on top of the plum hue) of the

frame. Finally, Rothko offers the viewer small glimpses of his underpainting, a significantly

cooler blue-violet that not only grounds the viewer’s gaze, but reinforces the notion that light is

squeezing out from a much deeper space that exists well beneath the calm of the plum-colored

shapes.

As his work continued to mature and evolve through the 1960s and into the 1970s, it

remained evident that the forms Mark Rothko employed in his paintings were actors, fulfilling

the roles his own memories and experiences had initiated for him. Through the diffuse

boundaries and thin, ghost-like presences on his surfaces, they confront viewers. These surfaces

that simultaneously withhold and dispense light create endless spaces , imbued with the viewer’s 6

own experiences and visible only through Rothko’s distillation of shape and color.

While Rothko was in the midst of his exploration of color-fields and rectangular

composition, Helen Frankenthaler was launching her own career. A student of the critic Clement

Greenberg, Frankenthaler, along with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland, were

pioneering what soon became known as the “soak-stain” technique in which diluted oil paint 7

was poured onto a canvas, soaking into the surface, highlighting the weave of the fabric, and

even leaving a glowing edge around the pigment. To Greenberg this technique was the ultimate

Bonnie Clearwater, The Rothko Book, (London: Tate Pub., 2006), 137.6

John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, (New York: Abrams Pub., Inc. 1989), 69-70.7

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synthesis of figure and ground, perfectly exemplifying Modernism’s overarching belief that form

is content enough. As he noted, “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by

it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like dyed cloth: the threadness and the wovenness are in

the color.” 8

The soak-stain technique and subsequent lack of a textural change in surface between

colors (even between painted and unpainted areas) created an consistent unity that did not

necessitate an uninterrupted composition. Frankenthaler’s initial synthesis of this technique and

composition can be observed in her 1952 painting, Mountains and Sea (Fig 3). In it, gestural

lines and shapes drawn in charcoal provide a very loose framework over which Frankenthaler

poured her paint. Transparent shapes of warm reds and yellows spring from cooler blues and

greens, evoking the depth of a landscape without the representation. It is precisely this

transparency of pigment in addition to the warm and cool juxtapositions that open the space

before the viewer. Just as the warm center of the painting progresses into cooler shapes, those

same blues and greens progress again into the warm tone of bare canvas, creating a tangible,

malleable depth in the painting that belies the flatness that typically accompanies a two

dimensional image as it approaches its surface’s edges. These transitions between various

transparent hues and eventually into the naked surface of the canvas itself serve to create a

dynamic and spiraling space, alive and breathing, all made possible by Frankenthaler’s staining

technique.

Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 70.8

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While Moutains and Sea lacked the all-over surface that Rothko employed in paintings,

and gave an obvious (albeit abstract) nod to landscape, its format and the manner in which the

image lay suspended between unfinished edges bears similarities to Rothko’s work of the same

period. For example, the low definition edges of No. 9 as well as its hue and value contrasts

offer to the viewer the idea that its space is limitless; it continues on even outside the edges of the

canvas. Similarly, Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea extends radial from the center of the

canvas, barely touching the edges in a few spots, but nonetheless implying that, given a larger

format, the space would continue on and on.

As Frankenhaler’s work evolved into the early 1960s, she continued to work with the

staining technique, experimenting with both oil and acrylic washes to achieve her desired effects

using the entire canvas as a receptor for color. As her interest in and use of acrylic paint grew,

her colors became more saturated and more dense in their application, even including the use of

cool dark browns and blacks. Though not specifically regarded among the Color Field painters,

her compositions, which had become decidedly less drawn and gestural than that of Mountains

and Sea, reflected a growing interest in a somewhat monolithic framework, even going so far as

to fit shapes inside shapes. This is not at all dissimilar to Rothko’s rectangular bands of color,

and the square-inside-a-square compositions of the Seagram series. For example, in her 1964

painting Buddha’s Court (Fig. 4), a framework of low-saturation green and orange squares

contains cooler shapes of blues, violets, and grays, all of which are balanced by a single fiery red

stroke toward the bottom. This confident and evocative composition conjures little of the

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appearance but all of the force of nature as the colors smolder next to one another. 9

Frankenthaler’s pouring technique applied to the interior shapes of color still allows the viewer

glimpses of the bare canvas. This is reminiscent of the manner in which Rothko allowed light to

radiate from behind and even within shapes of color.

Just as Rothko’s uneven surfaces throbbed between the viewer and some unknown depth,

Frankenthaler’s uneven applications of poured paint create similarly pulsating images. Mottled

shapes of puddled color create illusionistic spaces while simultaneously differentiating her from

her closest contemporaries such as Noland. In Buddha’s Court, each individual shape of color

shows some variation in its surface, but nowhere is this variation more obvious than in the three

shapes of blue. The outer limits of these shapes seem to rise toward the viewer, dissolving just

below the picture plane while the interior of these shapes exist in rich, dense hues that suggest

almost unfathomable depths. Though Frankenthaler stated, “My conscious interest was more in

drawing and the drawing of color than in color alone,” she also admitted to a desire to create

spaces that stretched edge to edge, confronted viewers at the surface, “and yet travel miles in

space.” In fact, to Frankenthaler, color and space were inseparable, and any attempt to use color 10

without acknowledging its capacity to move through space rendered it little more than a

decorative element.

Rothko’s influences can continue to be seen well into more recent contemporary art, and

in a variety of mediums as well, such as the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese-American

Lance Esplund, “Artistic Legacy; Frankenthaler is Recalled for Merging Genres,” Buffalo News, 30 9

December 2011, 9.

Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 184.10

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photographer. While explaining one of his earlier series of photographs of fossilized trilobites,

Hiroshi Sugimoto referred to the objects as “…pre-photography, a fossilization of time.” It is 11

precisely this sentiment that has not only guided Sugimoto’s work over the past twenty years, but

links a more recent series of seascapes to Rothko’s later works. His seascape photographs, shot

during various times of both day and night, look like Rothko’s paintings. Especially those

images in which the horizon line is imperceptible, masked behind a perfectly even gradient of

whites and grays, Sugimoto is giving the viewer a glimpse into a plastic void, just as Rothko did.

Additionally, though these are technically representational images, Sugimoto’s decision to focus

directly on the intersection of water and air, and his purposeful blurring and masking of that

divide strips the landscape of its most recognizable element: a horizon line. Instead Sugimoto

has created an undefinable edge between tangible and intangible elements, questioning where

one stops and the other begins, and in so doing so, raising the viewer’s awareness to similarly

existential ideas over which Rothko constantly obsessed.

The variety of edge and contrast of value in Sugimoto’s seascape photographs echoes

Rothko’s use of color and value within his rectangular formats to create active spaces that push

and pull the viewer. For example, in the piece titled Ligurian Sea, Near Saviore (Fig. 5), there is

a horizontal band of intense white that just barely extends from edge to edge, bulging in the

middle and pulsating as though the light just beneath the surface is alive itself, struggling to

squeeze through. The viewer can see a similar effect in Rothko’s Mural For End Wall, as his

fiery red strains to break from the lower-intensity plum-colored ground. This work, as well as

others by Sugimoto, establish an aura of the sublime. He has captured in one moment a perfect

Shattuck, Kathryn. “A Minimalist Adrift in a Sea of Acclaim.” New York Times, September 22, 2005, 1.11

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combination of history and present experience, instantly instilling simultaneously in the viewer a

memory and a new sight to behold.

Still, perhaps one of the most interesting features of Sugimoto’s work is his inclusion and

exclusion of the surface texture of the water. Though these photos are technically

representational, Sugimoto’s decision to include or exclude the surface texture of the water, as in

Ligurian Sea or North Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 6) respectively, is reminiscent of Rothko’s own

struggle with the presence of an “artist’s hand.” While the ethos of Modernism stipulated an

authentic surface devoid of external influence, Rothko did allow the occasional paint drip to

remain in place, or an errant brushstroke as one color dissolved into the next, as can be seen

along the border of the high-intensity red in Mural for the End Wall. In a similar way,

Sugimoto’s choice to leave evidence of a recognizable subject alludes to his desire to explore

these spaces in a more ontological manner. Where Rothko may have felt more bound by the

doctrines of Modernism, leading him to sneak in an expressive mark here or there, perhaps in a

subtly subversive act, Sugimoto faces no such limitations and opts instead for a quiet yet

unmistakable mark to indicate his human presence in the image.

As early as the Seagram Murals, the malleable atmospheres of Mark Rothko’s later work,

as he continued exploring color, shape and format, had a noticeable influence on his

contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, and have continued to inform the work of artists

like photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to this day. His reliance on the tenets of Modernism coupled

with an intrinsic desire to create paintings that were transcendent experiences made Rothko a

exemplar for the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters.

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Rothko’s paintings move the viewer toward a transformative experience. His spaces are

no illusion, for a point of origin or ending is completely missing, they simply exist. Each

painting is a brand new, plastic environment, moving within itself and shifting towards and away

from the viewer all at once. Subsequently, the work of Helen Frankenthaler, whose transparent

stains further reduced the separation between form and content, evolved to include surfaces that

were entirely covered with similar amorphous shapes of color. Her large-scale paintings and

their extension of hue to the very edge of the canvas, as well as her investigation of concentric

shapes were also aligned with Rothko’s efforts to build completely new plastic environments

which shifted and slid at the aesthetic discretion of the individual viewer. A further application

of these trans-figured spaces can be seen in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of water, air, and

their natural horizon lines. An imperceptible transition from top to bottom allude to a space

between man and God, a nod toward Rothko’s own consistent themes of transcendence, and an

extension of his investigation into our very existence.

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Bibliography

Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Clearwater, Bonnie. The Rothko Book. London: Tate; 2006.

Phillips, Glenn. Seeing Rothko. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005.

Rothko, Mark, and Achim Hume. Rothko: The Late Series. London: Tate Pub., 2008.

Shattuck, Kathryn. A Minimalist Adrift in a Sea of Acclaim. New York Times, September 22, 2005, http://0-www.lexisnexis.com.library.scad.edu.

Splund, Lance. Artistic legacy. Buffalo News, December 30, 2011, http://mu5em8zh4m.search.serialssolutions.com.

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Fig. 1: No. 9 (White and Black on Wine), Mark Rothko, oil on canvas, 105” by 166”, 1958.

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Fig. 2: Untitled, (Mural for End Wall), Mark Rothko, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 265” x 288”, 1959, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 3: Mountains and Sea, Helen Frankenthaler, Oil on Canvas, 7’-2 5/8” 9’-9 1/4”, 1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 4: Buddha’s Court, Helen Frankenthaler, Acrylic on Canvas, 94” x 98”, 1964.

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Fig. 5: Ligerian Sea, Near Saviore, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Silver Gelatin Print, 1993.

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Fig. 6: North Atlantic Sea, Cape Breton, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Silver Gelatin Print, 1996.