I was walking the dogs one morning and thinking about Mark Rothko's paintings and how one needed to see them physically to understand them. Just seeing a reproduction wouldn't give you a sense of the scale or the subtlety of the surface as shades move into one another, how things glow. You get a sense that they are people when you stand in front of them because you have your physical body in front of the physical painting.
So I popped off to MOCA to see the collection which everyone is rightly excited about. It is a nice collection of modernism. And there, right in front was an entire room of Rothko's. Man that guy could push paint. It was like seeing the room of Monet's waterlillies at MOMA where you need a recovery room. I felt like maybe I should just waver in my physicality. And then it was off to another room of Franz Klines - those winter landscapes of gesture. So beautiful.
Anyway there were some spectacular paintings from the 50's and early 60's and then you wandered into some great Louise Nevelson sculptures and then on into the Rauschenberg combines and Johns - great messy paintings with the kitchen sink thrown in - very exuberant.
The show was arranged roughly chronologically for a large part. The photographic collection was incredible. In the 50's and 60's you have all these beautifully observed black and white prints from Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Then the 70's happen and painting sort of stops. People paint paintings of stripes. Stripe paintings are kind of boring, especially walking through entire galleries of them. Painting was just not happening. Other things were like performance, conceptual art and photography. For example there was a hilarious Bruce Nauman where you walked through a square box hallway, there was a small black and white tv monitor on the floor in each corner and a small camera pointed at each corner which fed a one monitor back, so you were constantly chasing yourself, seeing just a hint of your back turning the corner on the far monitor you were approaching. It's like you were chasing your ghost. Another thing that starts happening is more color photography, the curators made a Nan Goldin room that is totally devastating.
Leaving the exhibit you pass a series of photographs documenting performances or earth works by the artist Ana Mendieta which are so evocative of loss. The human figure making a mark on the earth and leaving, graves - the metaphors are so rich when you look at the work, it is such a shame she died so tragically.
Then I popped off to Chicago and while there I did a brief run through of the Matisse show there. It's late work for him (and as opposed to the LACMA exhibit of Renoir late work which is go awful) it has some gorgeous important work in it. Matisse understood the 9000 shades of blue in the world. He understood green. He understood shapes. In the painting the Moroccans, he uses the shape of a turban to echo the shape of the mosque domes.
