This combination gallery talk and film screening explores Mark Rothko’s color field paintings and his captivation with seeing religious artwork in its original context in Italy. 

Join curator Jennifer Carty for a close look at No. 2, a signature 1962 Abstract Expressionist painting by Rothko in the Smart Museum’s collection, as well as other luminous paintings from the Renaissance on display in Calling on the Past. Then, walk across campus to the nearby Logan Center for the Arts for a special screening of the 2016 film The Silence of Mark Rothko. 

FREE, but space is limited. Please register in advance. 

Schedule

5 pm
Gallery talk
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue

6 pm
Film screening
Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th Street, screening room

About the film

THE SILENCE OF MARK ROTHKO Clip from Icarus Films on Vimeo.

The Silence of Mark Rothko
2016. 52 m. Marjoleine Boonstra. Icarus Films. Netherlands. English. Rated NR.

Painter Mark Rothko is best known for imposing canvasses that eschew representation in favor of pure color and texture—using them to express fundamental human emotions.

In THE SILENCE OF MARK ROTHKO, we visit Rothko’s studio at 22 Bowery in New York, and go to Florence's Museo di san Marco, where the monastic work of Renaissance painter Fra Angelico deeply influenced Rothko's mission to create environments and not just paintings. In The Hague, filmmaker Marjoleine Boonstra introduces us to curator Franz Kaiser of the Gemeentemuseum, as his team installs the works for the first major Rothko exhibit to be held in Holland in 40 years.

The film includes thoughtful, engaging commentary from experts including Rothko's biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, and conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro (who speculates on whether splotches of paint on the studio floor may have been Rothko's). Fittingly though, for a film about a painter whose greatest works evoke both silence and emotion, THE SILENCE OF MARK ROTHKO lingers on paintings and locations—using architectural shots, interiors and streetscapes, to link Rothko's paintings to the world he inhabited.

Featuring works from his early mythological period, his classic color field paintings, his later Black on Grey pieces, and the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the film is a unique artistic biography that provides a heightened level of intimacy and familiarity with its subject's work through carefully chosen visuals and interviews.

Interspersed throughout are readings from the painter's writings by his son, Christopher—passages that illuminate and bring immediacy to Rothko's work and philosophy.

A visitor to Calling on the Past. Photo by Jason Smith.