An Abstraction of Feeling: Mark Rothko and the Subject of Aesthetic Judgement

NOTES

• On this point see J-F Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, pp 15–26.
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• See G Didi-Huberman, “The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then, and Modernity”, (in R Francis et al, Negotiating Rapture—The Power of Art to Transform Lives, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, pp 48–63). Didi- Huberman writes here of the need for critical writing to formulate something like a “specificity of the non-specific” with regard to twentieth-century art: p 51.
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• See comments made during a talk given at Pratt Institute in 1958, cited in JEB Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp 389–397; in particular, p 390, p 396.
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• We should also note that although during this talk Rothko describes himself as an “abstract painter”, his view of the role of abstraction in his work is inconsistent. Elsewhere Rothko takes issue with the notion of abstraction and speaks of his paintings as “realistic”. Some equivocation on this point also seems unavoidable in the terms of the account I present here, because of the “reality” of the judgements that the paintings may be supposed to make, and an abstracting reference to “feeling” that these judgements involve.
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• Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p 3.
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• Breslin, Mark Rothko, pp 244–245, p 268.
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• ibid., pp 555–556.
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• “The Paintings of Mark Rothko: A Complex Simplicity”, in D Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London: Yale University Press/National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1998, p 98.
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• ibid., p 85.
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• ibid., p 99.
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• Rothko is more consistent in his articulation of a materialist stance than in his references to the “idea”, which hardly appear in statements from the 1950s and 1960s.
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• Rothko, Pratt talk, cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 395.
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• Reported in D Ashton, About Rothko, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, p 167.
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• Cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 306.
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• Interview with W Seitz, 1952, cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 331.
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• Draft of a letter to Clyfford Still, in C Ross (ed), Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York, Harry N Abrams, 1990, p 170.
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• Cited in Anfam, ‘The Paintings of Mark Rothko”, p 103, n 156.
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• Pratt Institute talk, cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 396.
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• Statement from 1951, in Ross (ed), Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, pp 171–172; see also comments cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 396.
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• Pratt talk, cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 395. This often-cited reference to “live unity”, follows and moderates a preceding statement: “I do not want unity.”
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• Interview with Seitz, cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko, p 330.
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• M Fried, Three American Painters, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965, p 39.
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• Greenberg writes: “… if I choose to feel that Kline is optimistic rather than pessimistic, who can say me nay?” (“Complaints of an Art Critic” (1967), in C Harrison and F Orton (eds.), Modernism, Criticism, Realism, London: Harper & Row, 1984, p 7).
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• See H Caygill's entry for “Feeling ‘“in his Kant Dictionary, London: Blackwell, 1995, p 197.
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• Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. JC Meredith, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, p 175.
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• ibid., p 42.
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• Lyotard calls aesthetic judgement the “faculty of the milieu” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p 131.
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• Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p 13.
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• This is Deleuze's phrase. See G Deleuze, ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Aesthetics”, Angelaki, vol 3, no 3, December 2000, p 63.
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• Cat. no. 813 in Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas.
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• Here it is evident from the “bleeding” at the bottom of the lower orange rectangle that at least some of this “ground” was painted after and over the painting of the lower figure.
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• See D Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), reprinted in J Meyer (ed), Minimalism, London: Phaidon, 2000, pp 207–210.
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• See Judd's remarks in B Glaser, “New Nihilism or New Art? Interview with Stella, Judd and Flavin” (1964), in Meyer (ed), Minimalism, pp 197–201.
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• Judd, “Specific Objects”, in Meyer (ed), Minimalism, pp 207, 209.
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