I Miss the Rothko Room

The Phillips Collection galleries have been dark and empty and our staff and visitors have been missing our beloved collection. In this series we will highlight artworks that the Phillips staff have really been missing lately. Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs Klaus Ottmann on why he misses the Rothko Room.

Rick Moody recording the sound of the Rothko Room, The Phillips Collection, November 2, 2012. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

It is in during these difficult times when most of us find ourselves stranded at home that the superb stillness of the Phillips’s Rothko Room comes to my mind most frequently. Closed to the public since March 14, it has become a “stillpoint of the turning word” of which T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem Burnt Norton, where there is “neither from nor towards . . . where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards.”

Mark Rothko once told Katherine Kuh, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago: “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 the opposite of what is decorative; . . . By saturating the room with the feeling of the work, the walls are defeated.”

No space I know has been more saturated by the emotive potence of color than the Rothko Room. Rothko instructed his largest canvases to be installed “so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.” He intended his pictures to be “very intimate and human.” The intimate scale of the Rothko Room epitomizes the artist’s desire to have the viewer enter into the human dramas acted out in his paintings:

“I think of my pictures as dramas, the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.”

In his Duncan Phillips Lecture, delivered on November 2, 2012, on the heels of another apocalyptic disaster, Hurricane Sandy, novelist Rick Moody recalled the time, when, as a college student in the 1970s, he experienced a performance of John Cage’s “silent” piano work 4′: 33”. He compared the experience to going through psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. He ended his lecture with an appeal to “listen” to visual art by playing the “sound” of the Rothko Room he had recorded earlier with his iPhone.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote:

“There is a need for a whole world of torment in order for the individual to produce the redemptive vision and to sit quietly in his rocking chair in mid-sea, absorbed in contemplation.”

Justine Otto: Phillips Collection Emerging Artist Prize

Justine Otto with work_AW

Artist Justine Otto with her work recently acquired by The Phillips Collection.

This month, The Phillips Collection awarded its second Emerging Artist Prize, again selected from works on display at the (e)merge art fair, which closed October 5. This year’s winner is the 40-year-old Polish-born German artist Justine Otto, whose works were on view at the Hamburg-based gallery polarraum. Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenovič, and myself selected two small paintings by the artist: O.T. (Strich) and Ophto.

Otto.Justine_Emerging Artist Prize

Justine Otto, Ophto, 2014. Oil on canvas, 19.7 x 15.7 inches. Copyright Justine Otto

Justine Otto’s figurative paintings show some affinities with the so-called New Leipzig School of painting, although Otto studied at the Städelschule, the prestigious art academy in Frankfurt, and lives and works in Hamburg. Like the most prominent protagonist of the Leipzig school, Neo Rauch, Otto’s paintings, most of which are based on found photographs, owe some debt to both social realist painting and surrealism. However, Otto paints in a more expressionist style, with looser brushstrokes, and her paintings mostly depict women, children, and animals, creating narratives that are both puzzling and intriguing.

The oval–shaped painting O.T. (Strich) (Untitled, Line) depicts a group of children working on a long table suggestive of a classroom. The subtitle may refer to series of lines that frequently appear in Ottos’s paintings, giving her work a touch of conceptualism. Ophto features a young woman holding up an ophthalmological instrument to her right eye while standing in a forest. Both paintings evoke the style of German photographs from the 1940s.

Otto’s works are welcome additions to our growing holdings of contemporary German art, which include recent acquisitions by Wolfgang Laib, Walther Dahn, Franz Erhard Walther, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüpertz.

As in the previous year, the Phillips Emerging Artist Prize was made possible by the generous support of Hank and Carol Brown Goldberg.

A Wax Room for Anselm

Last month I traveled from Paris to Barjac, a small town in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon northwest of Avignon, to attend the inauguration of a permanent installation by German artist Wolfgang Laib. Laib had been working for the last four years on an enormous beeswax room, not unlike the one he created at The Phillips Collection last year, but on a much larger scale—an underground chamber, about 40 meters (over 130 feet) long with many more lightbulbs but equally aromatic and meditative. Laib’s newest wax room, entitled From the Known to the Unknown—To Where Is Your Oracle Leading You (2014), is installed at La Ribaute, on the grounds of a former silk factory that is now the studio of the German artist Anselm Kiefer.

Laib Wax Room

Wolfgang Laib in his wax room at La Ribaute. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

Kiefer began developing this complex in the mid-1990s. It spreads over 86 acres and includes three 19th-century stone buildings surrounded by fields and woods. Two of the residential buildings are now connected by a industrial-sized enclosed footbridge that Kiefer built for his two young children when he still lived on the grounds (he has since moved with his family to Paris). Kiefer’s Gesamtkunstwerk is now comprised of more than 50 separate buildings out of glass, steel, or concrete as well as a series of underground tunnels—all housing his mostly monumental paintings and sculptures.

La Ribaute

La Ribaute, France. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

Laib’s wax room at La Ribaute is the first of a series of works by other artists Kiefer is planning to commission as he is starting to transform La Ribaute into a public exhibition site. The inauguration, which was attended by 300 guests including artists, collectors, and curators, took place on May 31 with a concert of music by Edgar Varese and Heinz Holliger, performed by the French Classical flutist Sophie Cherrier, a member of the renown Ensemble International, and an opulent dinner in Kiefer’s residential quarters.

One of the most impressive installations by Kiefer is an underground chamber that contains a small version of his work Les Femmes de la révolution (1992), which is comprised of lead beds, one photograph on lead, and wall texts. The work is inspired by The Women of the French Revolution, a chronicle by 19th-century historian Jules Michelet. A larger version of this installation is currently on view as part of Kiefer’s semi-permanent exhibition at Mass Moca in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Les femmes de la révolution

Anselm Kiefer, Les Femmes del la révolution (Installation at La Ribaute). Photo: Klaus Ottmann