Product Description
A visual analysis of the New York School painter, which examines the structure of Rothko's paintings while arguing that they implement traces of certain basic, symbolically charged pictorial conventions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Complete Analysis
I am a life-long fan of Mark Rothko's mature paintings, but I was always curious about how he arrived at his large field format.This book took me through his early works all the way through his last few paintings.It is an exhaustive analysis of Rothko's concept and execution.I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to understand this giant of the Modern era.

Fascinating introduction
Ms. Chave's book is quite a good introduction to 1950's abstract-expressionist art in general, and to Rothko in particular.She convincingly traces his development from realistic imagery throughMiro-like surrealism to his distinctive ethereal but emotional rectangles. Along the way, she makes a good case for his stubborn insistence that hiswork did, in fact, have a subject.At least one other art-thinker, GeorgiaO'Keeffe, caught on to this (in a documentary made a few years before shedied, O'Keeffe commented that a Rothko piece in the MOMA seemed like atimeline of a man's life), as did at least one of Rothko's more sensitivecollectors (this is chronicled in the book).This, in my opinion, is whyRothko's work isn't ideally suited for calm meditation, unlike that of someother abstract artists (which is not to say that being meditative is a badthing, by the way). I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn't quiteget modern art, and is willing to put some effort into the task. ... Read more

Product Description
Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is generally considered, along with Jackson Pollock, the preeminent artist of the group of painters who, during the 1940s and '50s, re-invented American art and became known as the Abstract Expressionists. Yet despite his success--people cried when they stood in front of his sublimely spiritual canvases--he suffered from intense anxiety and depression, and eventually took his own life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Use a Magnifying Glass
This was a teeny, tiny book....in my memory, it seems to have been about 8 x 8 inches.A magnifying glass will be "essential" to see the paintings.For an art book, the image resolution just isn't high enough to publish in this tiny format.

Nice Rothko Primer
This is a fine visual primer for many of Rothko's best works. Nice quality and color. Only caution is to note the size of the book before purchasing.It is not coffee table sized, but is rather small.

a pleasant surprise
when i first received the book i thought i'd made a mistake purchasing it but soon realized i had not!it has proven to be informative and concise and contains background and technique information i haven't seen in other larger more expensive books. really, a worthwhile addition.

Excellent
This is an excellent reference for anyone wanting to learn about Mark Rothko's work and life.Good format, easy to read great pictures. Great value for the price.

Wonderful Presentation !
This concise but very informational book is a must for anyone interested in the works of Rothko, and for those who want to know about the rise of abstract expressionism. There are full color illustrations provided which add greatly to the narrative!
The margin notes have a wealth of background material, without being too bogged down in minutia.
This work has been a wonderful addition to my art library as I am certain it will be to others. ... Read more

Product Description
In 75 full-color plates, The Art of Mark Rothko is an exploration of the artist and his work over the course of a 50-year career, including his often overlooked formative years. Essays contributed by some of the most influential critics of our time examine all four periods of Rothko's stylistic development. Illustrations. ... Read more

Product Description
Mark Rothko 2010 Super Poster Calendar: Mark Rothko Super Poster Calendar: Russian-born painter Mark Rothko is known for his basic style featuring two or three soft-edged rectangles on wall-sized canvases. Rothko's paintings have a great meditative impact, which is heightened when the large-format canvases are hung low and close to each other at exhibitions. The aim is to prompt in the beholder a sense of being able to enter into the painting. The colorful reproductions that grace this poster calendar are stunning enough to be framed and mounted on their own. A monthly European linear calendarium on each page will keep any art lover right on schedule. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Rothko + Timekeeping = A year of fun!
If you love Mark Rothko, as well as maintaining a firm grasp of your position within the solar year, then I highly recommend this "calendar". Each month has a gigantic Mark Rothko painting on it! And the days of the week as well! I'm probably a little too late in the year to give anyone an incentive to buy this, but if the maker produces one for the upcoming year, which seems to be called "2009", then buy one! Written on a Friday in August with a big ol' Rothko painting above it. ... Read more

Product Description
MARK ROTHKO

Mark Rothko (1903-1970, born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia) is one of the great 20th century American artists. A huge amount of material that has grown up around Rothko. Like Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Leonardo da Vinci, Mark Rothko has been lionized by hundreds of art critics. Rothko remains a greatly admired painter. His works will not, it seems, reach the same mass audiences as Monet or van Gogh, perhaps because Rothko is an abstract artist, and very few abstract artists achieve the megastature of figurative painters such as van Gogh or Monet.

Abstract art of the Mark Rothko kind – the colourfield skeins of Morris Louis, or the black stripes of polychrome shaped canvases of Frank Stella, or the bold, black, calligraphic brushstrokes of Franz Kline – has yet to become as widely accepted as Gustav Klimt’s nudes or Sandro Botticelli’s Madonnas. In the art world itself, though, Mark Rothko is a highly celebrated painter. He appears in the 20th century Olympian pantheon alongside Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Mark Rothko’s art has been seen by critics as ‘transcendent’ (Ashton, Robertson), ‘a sort of spiritual Stonehenge’ (Brookner), ‘lavish self-indulgence’ (Kozloff), ‘Dionysian’ (Hobbs), ‘sensuous and and spiritual’ (Waldman), ‘enormous, beautiful, opaque surfaces’ (Selz), ‘enigmatic, gripping presence’ (Goldwater), ‘incandescent color’ (Greenberg), ‘haunting’ (Sylvester), ‘visionary simplicity’ (Sandler) and ‘tinted hallucinatory cloth’ (de Kooning). For poet John Ashbery, Rothko ‘seems to eliminate criticism’.

The archetypal response to Mark Rothko’s art is that it is a (1) ‘heroic’, (2) ‘transcendent’, (3) ‘spiritual’ and (4) ‘tragic’ art. These are four of the most commonly deployed adjectives in Rothko art criticism (others include ‘Buddhist’, ‘Faustian’ and ‘death-conscious’). Rothko’s painting is seen as (1) ‘heroic’ because it attempts achieve something great in a world of Existential suffering. Out the slime and the pain and the horror of modern life rise Rothko’s ‘heroic’ canvases. His canvases become a gesture of affirmation in amongst the global angst (as with Rothko’s contemporaries, such as Pollock and Newman). ... Read more

Product Description
Ten 5x 7 in. notecards (two cards each of five images) with envelopes. ... Read more

Product Description
Visions is a collection of poems inspired by twentieth-century paintings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Unique and lovely poetry
A friend gave me two of Hofstadter's books. I'm not a great reader of poetry, but "Visions" was truely a unique and lovely collection of poems on paintings that I admire. I've never read anything quite like it. I then read Hofstadter's "House of Peace" very different but wonderful as well.

Poetry? No.
Marc Elihu Hofstadter, Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2001)

After I'd read a few pages of this, I was relatively sure I'd read it before; however, I couldn't find a review of it, so I figured I was just caught in a case of deja vu. Turns out that, no, I did read it back in 2004. But my review seems to have slipped through the cracks, so here I am again, having wasted another four hours of my existence on this godawful mess. You can be sure that this time it's headed off to Half-Price Books so I don't make the same mistake again.

There are a great many aspiring poets who don't understand that poetry is not just prose chopped up into little lines. Thankfully, you see this trend a great deal less among the published set, but there are still times when it rears its ugly head:

"I'm an artist trying to make a work
I've learned to draw well
so I put this white line here,
shade this yellow rectangle just so
and make the orange glow
But it's not quite right
It expresses my soul
but not all of it"
("No. 19, 1949")

I'm not even sure where to start with all that's wrong with that poem. However, it's pretty easy to illustrate what I'm talking about: write it out yourself, taking out all the line breaks, as a paragraph, inserting the necessary punctuation. Do you find it notably changed when you read it that way? If not, then what's the justification for making it poetry and not prose?

An awful book from front to back. I guess the reason I read it again is because I'd blocked it out of my head the first time; I shall endeavor to do so again immediately. *
... Read more