Painting and Price

The recent sale of a painting by Mark Rothko for a large sum of money led to a flurry of articles about the prices of abstract expressionist and pop art from the period most associated, the 1960’s. I do not want to talk about these admittedly huge prices. The works stand or fall on their merit as art not their price. Rothko’s painting has always had a strong effect and still seems to stand out from much of the work of contemporaries. I saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 at about sixteen and it made a strong impression. A poster reproduction of one of series in the Tate was bought around the same time and a constant feature on the wall through the coming years. 

Having said that abstract expressionism is associated with the 1960’s I note that Rothko was actually painting his early abstracts in the late Forties and most seem to date from the 50’s and early 60‘s. It was only in the 60’s when the work started to sell that he and other abstract expressionists begun to get a good deal of public attention, much of it negative. 

He was born in 1903 so the attention and material success came late. Given that he was painting abstracts in the late forties it was clearly not a matter of taking up a current style but a long process of gestation and refinement. Integrity and honesty suffuses the paintings which have a quiet power that has absolutely nothing to do with the deliberate breaking of conventions and does not rely on some intellectual concept : they just work as paintings, pure and simple but at the same time involving, concentrated and above all human. There is also considerable technique which is almost invisible due to being so well integrated into the work. Colour use is superb and works on the senses in a way that is close to the subtlety of great music. 

Yet it is always the price paid at auction that gains the headlines for modern art, although remember that much of this work is now more than 60 years old, it might be more fruitful to ignore the prices and simply look at such as Rothko’s paintings because they are simply very good and reward attention in ways that sadly much that has been produced and hyped up in the market in the last twenty years does not.