Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal
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Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal
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Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, “he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time.” Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal’s fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world—one whose legacy prevails to this day.
Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal - Amazon Sales Rank: #280941 in Books
- Brand: Cohen-Solal, Annie
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.00" w x 5.75" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 296 pages
Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal Review “Gripping . . . meticulous . . . this novelistic account is a rewarding close-up of Rothko’s . . . experience as a Jewish immigrant.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review (Publishers Weekly)"Cohen-Solal's study of Mark Rothko is notable for her ability to link his strong Jewish ties to his changing, evolving art. Her access to newly available archives enables her comprehensive portrait of the man . . . A sure hit for fans of art history, and readers looking to understand modern art and especially abstraction will find this wonderfully enlightening."—Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Reviews)“Once again, Annie Cohen-Solal has done it. As with her book on Leo Castelli, she has managed to bring not only Mark Rothko, but his time, to life. This book is a grand blend of biography, cultural history, and art criticism. Rare is the scholar who can pull it off so masterfully.”—David N. Myers, Professor of Jewish History, UCLA History Department (David N. Myers)“[A] tightly focused, profoundly clarifying biography . . . A defining and affecting tribute to a modern master.”—Booklist, starred review (Booklist)‘In this moving and readable biography, Cohen-Solal tells the story of Rothko’s life through the prism of his Jewishness.’—Marcus Field, the Independent. (Marcus Field The Independent 2015-03-14)“It’s unlikely that many of Rothko’s admirers understand his art as he wanted it understood. . . . Annie Cohen-Solal . . . corrects our perceptions in Mark Rothko.”—National Post (National Post)“This compact study places Rothko’s development within the context of the evolution of American art in the mid-twentieth century . . . Cohen-Solal subtly demonstrates the link between Rothko’s three outsider statuses (artist, immigrant, and Jew), his color-block canvases, and his essential Americanness.”—New Yorker (New Yorker)"Illuminating . . . Impressively sourced . . . A sublime little volume."—Washington Times (Washington Times)“An admirable attempt to construct a coherent framework around what is undeniably a complicated, not to say messy, life.”—Washington Post (Washington Post)“Engrossing.”—Times Higher Education Supplement (Times Higher Education Supplement)"Cohen-Solal's work is well-written and well-argued, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with Rothko, modern art, American intellectual history or the politics and processes of Jewish identity and assimilation."—Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland Plain Dealer)"Cohen-Solal has made an important contribution with a well-researched book about Rothko's life."—New Criterion (New Criterion)
About the Author Annie Cohen-Solal's books include Sartre: A Life (a best-seller translated into sixteen languages), Painting American (Académie des Beaux arts Prize), and Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (ArtCurial Prize).
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful. Interesting but ultimately unpersuasive look at influence of Judaism on Rothko By Alan A. Elsner What is it that gives the paintings of Mark Rothko their tremendous power? Why do those squares of vibrating color, that seem to float in space, somehow liberated from their canvases, exert such fascination?Of the depth of emotion they provoke, there can be no doubt. In the words of British art historian Simon Schama, who regards Rothko as the equal of Rembrandt or Turner, these paintings are “emotionally stirring and sensuously addictive, emanating an uncanny force field …”Rothko’s development as an artist is the subject of this new study by Algerian-born French scholar Annie Cohen-Solal, which its publisher is promoting as “the only up-to-date biography of the artist available in English.”Cohen-Solal puts forward an interesting hypothesis – that Rothko’s Jewish roots were central to his mature identity as an artist. “This complex relationship to the Talmud is in fact the key to understanding the life and work of Mark Rothko,” the author claims. Unfortunately, her argument is unpersuasive.Markus Rotkovitz was born in the city of Dvinsk (now in Latvia) in 1903. His father , a free-spirited, pharmacist and voracious reader, had chosen secular schools for his first three children – but decided to send Markus to an orthodox Talmud-Torah. The author speculates that a wave of vicious anti-Semitic pogroms across the Pale of Settlement in 1905 lay behind this decision.Marcus’ Jewish education did not last long. By 1913, the whole family had emigrated to America, settling in Portland, Oregon, and a year after that his father died. The only family member with a Jewish education, the young Markus dutifully recited the daily Kaddish -- until one day the 11-year-old decided that he would never set foot in the synagogue again. And from that point on, his relationship with formal Judaism was at an end.It is ironic that this book is published by the Yale University Press in light of the miserable time the young Rothko endured at the Ivy League school from 1921-23. Rothko felt excluded by its WASPY elite and dropped out after two years. It was soon after this, in 1923, the author tells us, that Rothko suddenly decided to become an artist. “According to the legend, Marcus Rothkowitz discovered his calling by chance, or rather, by epiphany. One day in 1923, he visited a friend who studied figure drawing at the Art Students League. ‘It is the life for me,’ he said on the spot.”There’s no further discussion in the book of this decisive moment – what led up to it, what provoked it, how it happened. To quote from the classic Western, ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:’ “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”Throughout this turgidly-written book, the author occasionally cherry picks facts to back up her thesis that Judaism and Talmud are central to Rothko. “A radical but disciplined scholar, using the rhetorical tools of the Talmud and its tradition of study, he engages in a series of challenging one-on-one conversations with an imposing list of the great names of the past,” she declares. In another passage, she argues, again without attribution, that Rothko’s artistic quest was a pursuit of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world.In no sense is this book a true biography. For all the layers upon layers of details lavished on the circumstances of his birth and early childhood, the author skates over Rothko’s mature personal life. His last, unhappy years, when he fell into depression and heavy drinking and when his marriage fell apart, are dealt with in a couple of pages. His suicide is dispatched in a single sentence.Ultimately, this book misses the main point about Rothko, drowning his vision in a welter of words. How did he achieve those shimmering panels of color? Quoting Schama again from his superb BBC documentary ‘The Power of Art,’ (available on YouTube): “It’s not what the colors are that make them work on our senses. It’s what they do. Colors in motion, they seem to breath and swell like sails catching the wind…beckoning you into some kind of deep, undefined, radiant yonder.”A few hours pondering these powerful and mysterious expressions of wordless sensation may not explain Rothko any more than one can truly comprehend Bach or Shakespeare – but they do somehow, bring us closer to the basic emotions that define our humanity.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful. Mark Rothko... By Jill Meyer Author Annie Cohen-Solal, in her new biography, "Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel", asks the provocative question, "Why, when during the previous centuries Jews had generally been absent from the visual arts, did the dawn of abstraction coincide with their entrance into the world of art, with Jewish collectors, critics, artists, dealers detecting, supporting, and following the lessons of the first Modernists?" And she answers it in her book by looking at the life, career, and world of Mark Rothko.Rothko was at the turning point when American artists began to be valued as much as their European counterparts. He was part of a group of painters - Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, among other contemporaries - whose art transcended the past and moved these artists into the mainstream of accepted art. Their art was finally purchased and exhibited at the MoMA - which had the mindset of "European-art-is-best" - in the 1940's and 1950's.Cohen-Solal examines Mark Rothko - born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1904 in current-day Latvia - in as much of a religious context as that of an artistic. For Rothko was a Jewish artist, and his religious beliefs and practices were important to his art. Mark Rothko emigrated from the Pale of Settlement in 1907 as conditions for the Jewish population became increasingly tenuous. His family settled in Portland, Oregon where his father died a few years later. Rothko was raised as an observant Jew - though curiously his elder brothers and sister were raised somewhat more haphazardly - and he was active as a teenager in the Russian Jewish neighborhood of Portland. He received a scholarship to Yale - that bastion of WASPness - but left after two years. After finding himself in the 1930's as a budding artist, he moved to New York City, and made his way steadily up the art world ladder into acceptance, and eventually some wealth.But Mark Rothko was a contrarian, too. He accepted a commission to provide art for the new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, but pulled out and returned his advance when he visited the restaurant. He disliked the clientele, the menu, the ambiance, and, hell, the WEALTH of the place. Several panels of the art he had made were placed in Houston in the Rothko Chapel, built by the Menil family. His post-war years were his most fruitful but his persona began to change. He separated from his wife and two children in the late 1960's and committed suicide in 1970. His fame and his work have long outlived him.Annie Cohen-Solal returns, in the end, to the city in Latvia he and his family had left more than 100 years before. His children opened a museum dedicated to Marcus Rothkowitz. He - and his art - had come full circle.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A rounded portrait. By Scott Hatt A terrific, well researched biography of a multifaceted master of painting. The solid references and bibliography provide a foundation for further research and readings. Rothko is seen in context with his family, artistic peers, and the American art world of his time. An enjoyable read. The translation is solid.
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Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal
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Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives), by Annie Cohen-Solal
