America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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New York, N.Y., 1955

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In the aftermath of World War II, a number of artists experienced an existential crisis: How could art be meaningful in the wake of such tragedy? What visual language could describe inner and outer worlds so irrevocably transformed? Artists in the United States felt compelled to make art that was unmistakably new. In 1948, Barnett Newman wrote of himself and his peers: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.” By largely abandoning European influences, they invented what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim.

European Surrealism, nevertheless, offered crucial inspiration, especially its exploration of the psyche through automatic drawing, anthropomorphism, and personal symbolic languages—elements that can be seen in the work of Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Richard Pousette-Dart. Others, including Alfonso Ossorio and Jackson Pollock, focused on how the spontaneous interaction between materials and radical processes, such as spraying and pouring, might convey authenticity and immediacy. This art evinced an unprecedented sense of scale, tied not only to the size of the canvas but to the muscular strokes and broad fields of color that dominated it. Critic Edwin Denby recalled that for him and Willem de Kooning this expansiveness came from their culture and surroundings: “At the time we all talked a great deal about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale.”

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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MARK ROTHKO (1903-1970), FOUR DARKS IN RED, 1958

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958

In Where We Are and America Is Hard to See

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Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958

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A.M. Homes: And I think for me, looking at Mark Rothko paintings was, for lack of a better description, the first time I saw myself in art. 

Narrator: Novelist A.M. Homes.

A.M. Homes: I also think it’s an incredibly compressed field which always amazes me that he is able to take everything from horror and ecstasy and pure, sheer rage and the most sublime, delicate, wonderful experience and boil it all down and render it as indivisible. Each element is there and you can't even begin to break apart which one is which.

I think that he achieves in his paintings what I'm trying to achieve in fiction. Which is that expression of the things that go unseen and unsaid and unarticulated. And I'd never seen anything—color, gesture, texture—represent an emotional experience so fully. So that meant an incredible amount to me.

The story of me and Mark Rothko is that when I was a kid, my father, who's a painter, used to go every weekend and look at art in Washington. And every weekend, I would eventually go with him. Because in addition to being a lover of art, my father was also incredibly picky about what foods we ate and what we could have in the house. And he was a real health food fanatic early on. So we had no cookies, we had no cake, we had no twinkies or hohos. We also couldn’t have grapes that weren’t picked by union workers and no iceberg lettuce and no soda. But if you went with my father to look at art, at a certain point he could break down and he would take you to the cafeteria. And in addition to not allowing sweets he also kind of got overwhelmed in the cafeteria because I think it was his big moment as well and so you could pick out whatever you wanted. And you could usually pick out more than one thing. So you could have pie AND Jello which I think was almost anti-religious in our family. And I would go with him, and I would sit in museums all over Washington, looking at art for hours and hours and hours, and having this accidental art education where I would just stare at the painting sitting on benches waiting for him. And in the end it turned out it was really incredibly marvelous. And I discovered Mark Rothko among many other artists. And had very nice pie at the end of the day. And I think it's in a large part how I became who I became.

Four Darks in Red exemplifies Mark Rothko’s darker palette of the late 1950s, when he increasingly used red, maroon, and saturated black hues. When seen close up (as the artist intended), this nearly 10-footwide canvas engulfs the viewer in an atmosphere of color and intense visual sensations. The weightiest dark color is at the top of the canvas while a softer, roseate glow emanates from below, creating a reversal of visual gravity. Rothko believed that such abstract perceptual forces had the ability to summon what he called “the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.”

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