I admit, I never cared overly for either Rothko or Newman until I saw both painters represented in MoMA in November 2007.  The scope of the compositions, the way they blot out enormous swaths of wall, create an interesting space for an art encounter.  My changed opinions aside, these two works each deserve articles to themselves, but my focus here is less on reading the works (though I will do that) than on crediting the curator responsible for placing these two pieces next to each other in the museum.  We’ll address each work, then look at the curator’s stroke of genius.

The Rothko colors shake and vibrate against each other with clashing tones of orange and burnt browns and shadowy reds.  The fuzzed boundaries of the color blocks make them appear to hover off the canvas, and the warmth of the tones advance them into the area between the audience and the picture plane.   Looking at the shapes of the blocks, we get a visual cue for a door or window, several panels/panes stacked on top of each other. In short, the Rothko overcomes its boundaries and surges into the room reveling in the potentialities of the liminal.  It inhabits two spaces at the same time, the space within the frame and the territories immediately outside that frame.

Walking from the Rothko to the Newman, I was struck at how diferent this piece strikes the eye.  The color is pure red pigment with only slight variations in thickness and coverage.  The tall rectangle of color is bisected, however by a pure white stripe of unpainted canvas, one of Newman’s trademark “line zips.”  Given the intensity of the color and how it comes right at the viewer, the painting also seems emptied of it’s impact by the thin white line, almost as if this tiny gesture is a chasm into which the pigment must now try--however unsuccessfully--to flow, to fill.  In this way, the viewer is first attracted by the intensity, only to have this intensity bleed away through the gap.  Other than the white line, the painting is a bit bleak and featureless, or rather, what features are in the paint are rendered insignificant beside the intensity at the middle of the work.  

The paragraphs above are attempts to read each painting on its own terms, but how successfully can we attempt such unbiased eyes?  Both works are large and commandingly placed in the gallery, and it’s almost impossible to ignore either one as you approach the other.  Here we arrive, then, at the masterstroke of the curator: the audience must consider one work in the differential terms of the other.  Basically, what you see in the periphery cannot but influence your response to the primary.

I’m not even certain that I could discuss the Rothko’s restless boundaries, or the Newman’s anti-catharsis, without having the other example just a glance away.  Each painting can doubtless influence and impress a viewer with its own merits, but the conversation really depends on the willingness of the reader to dwell in front of the paintings well beyond whatever the text tells museum patrons to think about.  By placing these two beside each other, though, the differences and similarities become alarming and obvious, and include the reader in a very different way.  They come into a conversation as a third party looking first at one and then at the other painting, finding new things with each conscious or subconscious connection.  

Despite the clever placement and the willingness of the curator(s?) to let the artworks communicate in a very provocative way so near each other, still visitors to the museum can be heard to say things like “Well, it is what it is.”  But I can’t help but believe that even these viewers are spending a moment longer than otherwise thanks to the associations and contrasts that germinate--largely subconsciously--in the eye of the reader before he or she walks away.

To the curator’s art: kudos for making this gallery as strong as it could be.