by Jon Lackman | 7 November 2007 | Americas, Modern
In the July 2007 Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Andrea Pappas argues that, although abstract expressionism was marketed as an art of “timeless, ‘universal’ themes and subjects,” at least one of its artists had other things on his mind:
The standard view of Rothko presents him as an artist who eschewed the particular, the local and the political in favour of the timeless and universal. Read in this way, the paintings remain largely unintelligible or legible only in general terms. Yet, when read through the lens of Jewishnewss, iconographical investigations into Rothko’s early works yield new insights into his working process and the relationships between those “mythic” paintings and contemporary events. Some new possible meanings that can be uncovered in the early works also help to explain his repeated insistence that his work — even his abstract work — did have subject matter.
