No. 61 (Rust and Blue)
Large, softly edged fields of colour hovering one above the other. Rothko wanted viewers to stand close and experience colour as emotion – he spoke of tragedy and ecstasy.
The edges are blurred, so the fields seem to breathe against the background.
Mark Rothko painted No. 61 (Rust and Blue) in 1953. He was born in 1903 in Dvinsk in what was then Russia, today Daugavpils in Latvia, and came to the United States as a child. He began as a figurative painter and later tried Surrealist motifs. By around 1950 he had developed the large colour-field paintings for which he became known. The painting belongs to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
The picture is taller than it is wide. It consists of large, softly edged rectangles hovering over a coloured ground. A rust-brown tone and a blue tone dominate, as the title indicates. The rectangles have blurred edges, and you can see the paint thinning where the fields meet.
The composition is simple but carefully balanced. The fields are stacked one above the other and fill almost the entire surface. There is no fixed point on which to rest the eye. Rothko wanted viewers to experience the colour as a whole, not to look at details.
Rothko painted in thin layers of diluted paint laid one over another. Light from the underlying layers shines through, and the fields seem to glow. He experimented with different binders and with how glossy or matt the paint should be. As a result the paintings can look different depending on lighting and distance.
Rothko refused to call himself an abstract artist in the sense that his pictures were only about colour and form. He said he was interested in expressing basic human emotions such as tragedy, ecstasy and doom. He wanted people to stand close to the paintings so that they filled the field of vision and became an experience rather than an object. He was particular about how the works were hung, preferring subdued lighting and paintings hung low, so that viewers met them at eye level.
He became one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and of what is called Colour Field painting. Later he made darker works, including paintings intended for a restaurant in New York, and a series for a chapel in Houston now known as the Rothko Chapel. Rothko took his own life in 1970.
The painting came to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles as part of a large collection of American post-war art that the museum acquired from the Italian collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo in the 1980s. It is regarded as a typical example of Rothko’s classic period. His works are now among the most expensive on the art market, and his way of working with colour has influenced both art and architecture.