`WEIGHING
AND WANTING'
B
In Rome, 1966:
Mark Rothko, the
painter Carlo
Battaglia,
Rothko son
Christopher and
his wife Mell.
father manipulating lighting effects and foreshadows
the block-like focus of the abstract period. A work
with aquatic figures and aquatic landscapes is gray
on gray and seems to be one of the channels into the
more amorphous bands of color that would perme-
ate later renderings.
"My sister [Kate Rothko Prizel] and I maintain
together a collection of my father's works, and we
are quite involved in helping organize shows," says
Rothko, who finds this endeavor competing with his
own professional time.
"We were very active in helping the National
Gallery put together the large retrospective of my
father's works, and it moved to the Whitney
Museum in New York and on to Paris. A different
show was planned for Barcelona and Basel."
Rothko remembers going to his father's last studio,
an enormous space that never had visitors during
times of work..The artist needed to be alone with his
paintings and spent a lot of time contemplating his
projects.
The last project was a mural series fOr the
University of St. Thomas in Houston, where the
nondenominational space that held the artist's works
was named the Rothko Chapel.
"Most people who talk about my father's artwork
talk about a very strong spiritual or religious ele-
ment," Rothko says. "Although it would be difficult
to say that it was a specifically Jewish one, I know
that my father always thought of himself very clearly
as a Jew, not religiously but certainly ethnically.
"Part of the reason that his style became so reduc-
tionistic was that he was trying to find some type of
universal language that would cross cultural and reli-
gious boundaries to have a direct experience between
painting and viewer. He wanted to be able to com-
municate as broadly as possible. That's partly where
his spiritual, religious element comes from, but at
least in his mind, it was not specific to any one reli-
gion."
The artist, married to a book illustrator who was
not Jewish, rebelled against observance after being
forced to attend cheder by a father who had a reli-
gious awakening. Biographers have written of the
artist's anxiety about assimilation mixed with his
desire to convey a universal — and not particularly
Jewish — message.
Christopher Rothko, whose family belonged to
Congregation Beth Israel while living in Ann Arbor,
drew his religion from his sister and brother-in-law,
who keep a Jewish home. There are friends from the
synagogue to visit when he returns for a January
reception celebrating the exhibit.
"There have been many painters influenced by my
father and the school of painting he represented,"
Rothko says. "Abstract expressionists made up the
first school of painters to get international recogni-
tion for American art and made New York one of
the art centers of the world." ❑
"Mark Rothko and the Lure of the Figure:
Paintings 1933-1946" runs through Feb. 25 at the
University of Michigan Museum of Art. A cura-
tor's talk begins at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28. Docent
tours are scheduled at 2 p.m. Sundays, Feb. 4 and
11. A gallery talk by Jim Cogswell of the U-M
School of Art begins at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb.
8. Videos relevant to the subject begin at 12:10
p.m. Wednesdays and 1 p.m. Sundays throughout
January. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays and
noon-5 p.m. Sundays. The museum will be closed
Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve and
New Year's Day. (734) 764-0395.
orn of Lithuanian and German-Jewish
descent, white South African artist William
Kentridge, in his drawings and video projections,
has long examined the repression of apartheid's
racial policies and its disastrous effects on the
people of South Africa.
In "Weighing ... and Wanting," an exhibition
organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art,
San Diego, and running at the University of
Michigan Museum of Art through Jan. 7,
Kentriclge, in his seventh video, chronicles the
changing fortunes of a character named Soho
Eckstein, a wealthy industrialist whose appear-
ance is based on Kentridge's grandfather and the
artist's own features.
This video, anchored around the themes of
memory and reconciliation, offers the possibility
of the latter to figures devastated by their past,
and may symbolize a new beginning for South
Africa. Earlier videos focused on Eckstein, his
wife and her lover, Felix Teidebaum.
Also featured in the exhibition are Kentridge's
preparatory drawings for his animated videos.
Their erasures, smudges and retracings are
indicative of the passage of time and the transfor-
mation of South African society as it moves from
apartheid to democracy.
William Kentridge:
From "Weighing ... and Wanting,"
(detail), video, 1997. Broad gestural
charcoal drawings lie at the heart
of the artist's animated videos.