a b s t r a k s h u n

Oil on paper mounted on linen

The lion teaches the cub by making it lose its way - 2023

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Mark Rothko The Drawings of 1962 Wove paper. all approx. 11 1/16 x 8 9/16 in. (28.1 x 21.7 cm) Mixed media (Pencil, Ink, Watercolor and Wash) All Gifts of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko

We don't see many late drawings from Rothko, there's one in '56 and some that are studies for mural projects, but for some reason, in 1962 we have this nice group of works on paper. What the intention of then was, no one knows for sure.

In 1962 Rothko was working on the Harvard Murals, but these drawings don't really resemble that work and only the 3rd drawing, in pencil. seems more like it might have been a sketch.

But it's still a little funny. The Seagram and Harvard mural sketches are cementing shapes that Rothko wasn't known the use. After all the stacked rectangle forms Rothko had painted by 1962, why sketch a single one out in pencil?

In seems likely to me that at least the 4 of them, in ink, were meant to stand alone, but we will probably never know.

I'm presenting them here as a set even though they are all up on the blog individually. For one thing it's nice to look at then this way, and for another these are recent scans from the NGA, which are different in small ways than what's already up. The previous scans are professional vetted scans but these new ones were probably done all at the same time and we sometimes see less yellow in the paper than we've seen before.