Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Mark Rothko
American; 20th-century
Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum
84%
No. 13. Oil on canvas. 1949
More than enough time has passed since the moment of Rothko's achievement to recognize that his interstitial paintings — the ones that came between his early surrealism and his austere endgame — are mostly the best ones he made. His middle style is the same as his late style in the way colors function as both conduits for forms and as fleshed forms in themselves, and in the way structure is only ever, at most, an implication (it wafts). In a middle painting like this one, though, the relative busyness introduces so many potential points of failure — cracks and joints in the arrangement where one could imagine the Rothko-effect of constant, vague pulsation getting tripped up and tumbling — that its ultimate success seems the more miraculous. There are all of its rhymes and doublings, which enhance — strengthen? — the spectral way its colors work atop the canvas's raw ground. Pigment is very thinly applied, and sometimes blocks of color are surrounded by an aureole of some other color; this muddies the water of what's figure and what's ground. (2025)