Travel Journal

I was in Munich, Germany this past March and without knowing about it before arriving I kept seeing flyers randomly stuck around the city for a Mark Rothko Restropective. It was an obvious and recognizable image among everything I was trying to decipher in German around me.. It was also a few blocks away from the city center that I had already walked admiring the beautiful Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall) built between 1867 and 1908 in the Flemish gothic style.




My son is becoming quite the photographer


Mark Rothko Retrospective

February 8 - April 27, 2008

The Kunsthalle of the Hypo-Cultural Foundation

Munich, Germany

The Kunsthalle of the Hypo-Cultural Foundation

This was a wonderful exhibition curated by Oliver Wick who was also responsible for the last Rothko retrospective in Basel. More than 70 oil paintings and 40 works on paper were respresented from all phases of his career. It was especially interesting for me to witness my 5 year old son wearing a bright red coat and the only child in a jam packed gallery amongst the other viewers all in black winding his way through to reach a perfect two feet in front of huge canvases to get the full impact of Rothko's work. He felt this work without a doubt and left the show asking for a large canvas for himself. My work was done.

In a September 25, 1954 letter to Katharine Kuh, Rothko wrote that:

"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale. I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare. By saturating the room with the feeling of the work, the walls are defeated and the poignancy of each single work…become[s] more visible. I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture. This may well give the key to the observer of the ideal relationship between himself and the rest of the pictures. I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as possible, for that is the way they were painted."

Rothko would also note on another occasion that "historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous," but the reason he painted large pictures was "precisely" because he wanted to be "very intimate and human."


Mark Rothko, Portrait 1939

Mark Rothko, Rites of Lilith, 1945

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949

Mark Rothko, No 12, 1951