Untitled 1961

This ‘Untitled’ painting was made by Mark Rothko with oil paint on canvas sometime in the mid-20th century. The forms here aren’t exactly geometric, but kind of fuzzy, atmospheric, painted wet-into-wet, and that horizontality is crucial. Looking closely, the paint isn’t really thick or showy. It’s translucent, almost stained into the canvas. It’s like he wanted to create a space that vibrates. There's a subtle glow, where the orange radiates from within. It’s interesting, because the horizontal composition has echoes of landscape, but it's not a landscape, and that tension is where the work lives. Rothko’s contemporary Barnett Newman also explored abstraction, but in a different way, with big zips of color that divide the canvas vertically. Both artists provoke these sublime, almost spiritual experiences, but with very different marks. They both get to the heart of what painting can do. It is about what it is but also about everything else.