Rothko/Giotto
"Rothko/Giotto" by Patrick Howlett, Fall 2009, pp. 136-137
Housed in a modest room in the Gemäldegalerie, this small exhibition nonetheless came equipped with a big catalogue, wall texts and a videoguide. It was substantial support for an exhibition made of only three works—Mark Rothko’s Reds No. 5 (1961) and Giotto di Bondone’s Death of the Virgin (ca. 1310) and Crucifixion (ca. 1315). Each work occupied a wall of its own. The simplicity of the installation was evocative of Rothko’s ideal viewing scenario: a chapel-like space in which a single work could be contemplated in detail. The show encouraged comparative looking and made it possible to find an ideal viewpoint from which to activate each painting’s spatial dynamics.
Having seen last winter’s major exhibition of Rothko’s late work at Tate Modern, I was primed to see his paintings again, but disarmed by the little room. The silk-covered walls put us at a remove from the standard white-cube museum context, and the gap of 650 years between the artists contributed to the strange feeling that the exhibition existed out of time. While it is not strange that an artist would study work from the past, nor that art historians would be interested in such connections, the exhibition nonetheless achieved something rare. By limiting its quantitative focus, it let an engaging qualitative one emerge. With big shows, a certain pace must be maintained if one is to see everything, as though speed-reading were the new paradigm for gallery-going. The Gemäldegalerie, in contrast, rewarded slower, more focused looking.
In their respective historical moments, Giotto and Rothko both contributed to the opening and extending of pictorial space, often through colour. To his original audience, I imagine, Giotto’s works must have been shockingly illusionistic, just as Rothko’s would have seemed flat to his. Seeing their works side by side allowed viewers to make connections in the present. The eye appeal of all three paintings lay, in fact, in their duality as both flat surfaces and windows onto an imaginary space. Giotto’s figures overlap like paper cut-outs, but the robes in which they are draped are filled with movement and modelled with layers of unexpected colour juxtapositions. Rothko also built up and contrasted layers of colour, creating veil-like effects across the entire surface of the canvas. Both artists used framing devices and contrasting colours and shapes to create the feeling (a better word than illusion) of space.
The show suggested an aesthetic experience that Jorge Luis Borges once described in a lecture on poetry: the artist invents the work, but in a way that is akin to remembering something once known but forgotten. Borges also stressed the viewer’s engagement with the work: “Poetry is not the books in the library…Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.” Perhaps this is what Rothko felt upon seeing the art of Giotto.
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