Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Shut up.

(I have to wonder, when the museum needs more of these, can they just make their own, or do they have to reorder them from some sort of art supply warehouse filled with blank canvases and small slips of paper cut to Yoko's exact specifications, two things on which her art seems to depend heavily?)

After two hours or so of looking at and talking about the works in the BMA together, the class disbanded for the afternoon (we were to meet again once more at our regular time later that week), but Brenda and I decided to take advantage of our free admission to the museum to have a look at some of the other exhibits. The big one was called Work Ethic, and explored how artists have challenged the traditional notions of who can call themselves an artist by removing themselves from the primary creation of a work of art by instead becoming the manager of the creation process or simply a generator of ideas. There was lots of silly stuff here, too, but it was still interesting to walk through. Yoko Ono was heavily represented, with at least three pieces that I can remember (two more read-this-piece-of-paper things and one where viewers were allowed to hammer a nail into a canvas, which I liked for the meaningless destruction aspect), along with a piece that had you walk down a really long, narrow hallway while watching yourself on a television monitor located at the end of the hall (that really creeped me out for some reason—I wouldn't do it until Brenda did it first). My favorite work was a piece by an artist named Tom Friedman called Everything, which was a big piece of paper onto which the artist had supposedly written every word in the American Heritage Dictionary with a ball point pen over the course of three years. I can appreciate that kind of dedication to essentially meaningless pursuits (did I mention that my job is really annoying me recently?). Another piece that turned out to be pretty interesting was a big pile of green candy strewn in a single layer in a rectagle on the floor that invited people to take a piece. So I did:

There were instructions that came with this installation, which I read before I took the candy. The way I remember it, the museum was responsible for replenshing the supply of candies so that visitors would not have to feel as though they were participating in the destruction of the work by taking a piece. But Brenda did not take a piece, because when she read the instructions, she thought that visitors who took a piece would be responsible for replenishing the supply, not the museum, as a way to get viewers to take responsibility for maintaining and giving life to works of art after their creators had released them to the public. We didn't discuss this until after we had left the exhibit, and neither of us felt like going back to find out what exactly the text said, so we left it unresolved. Which I kind of liked.

We strolled quickly around a few other exhibits, including some of the funiture and decor exhibits in the permanent collection and an exhibit called the Beaded Prayers Project that collected several thousand tiny packets made of cloth and adorned with beads that each contained a piece of paper with a wish or a prayer from the person who made it. The vivid colors are what drew Brenda and me in, but I like the idea a lot, too.

Brenda and I took a quick look around the museum store and then went our separate ways; she had papers to grade and I had some work to do at the office (conveniently located less than five minutes from the BMA) before heading home to work on my paper for class which was due Thursday.

*Apologies to Dr. Strangelove

Despite my love for the visual arts, the only other art course I had taken before this class was a survey art course during my undergraduate years that started with the Egyptians and worked up to the present century. Although I enjoyed the course immensely, it stopped pretty much after Picasso, meaning that we got into Dada and Surrealism but not really that much further. We covered some of the same movements that were covered in this course, but whether it was the living, changeable canvases of Impressionism, the fractured facets of Cubism, or the strange delusional dreams of Surrealism, the art of these movements still made sense to me: it was still largely representational, the artists were clearly skilled and very thoughtful about the work they were doing, and the works often contained overt references to the art that had come before them. Even though the artists in these movements were clearly reacting radically to traditional representational and academic art, their work was still obviously part of that tradition: I didn't have a problem fitting their art into the story of Western art as a whole.

The primary reason I took this class was because wanted to move forward in the 20th century and start to come to grips with the abstract, non-representational art that is what most people think of when you say the phrase "modern art", because it was when artists began to move towards pure abstraction that I began to have trouble fitting them into the big picture of the history of art. Despite my love for art and ideas (or maybe because of it), my reaction to most abstract pieces was of the typical "anyone could have done that" variety. I wasn't able to figure out how what these artists were doing fit into the evolution of art; rather, I considered what they were doing a de-evolution, a taking away from the layers of meaning in art that had been built up by the culture over centuries.

Modernist expressions in literature, my primary field of study, certainly struggle against the conventions of earlier genres and styles, but no matter how much modern authors might twist, reshape, and contort their sentences, they must still work within the rational constructs of grammar and syntax in order to make their work understandable; to tear the fabric of language radically would be to turn their work into gibberish. Painters, on the other hand, have no such constraints; reading is necessarily a more cerebral exercise than simply viewing (although it certainly helps to invest mental energy in "reading" paintings, it is not strictly required in order to understand the work on a basic level), and visual artists therefore have greater license to express pure intuition and imagination with line and color. But though we as viewers can react to these works on a purely visual basis, we also have a hard time resisting the impulse to attach meaning to them, no matter how much they might try to resist being categorized, classified, labeled, and named. From Mondrian's geometric grids with the occasional square of red, blue, or yellow to Duchamp's ready-mades, I wasn't quite sure what modern art was trying to tell me, or whether the people making it intended for it to tell me anything at all. It was as if I was reading a book that was written in English, but had no meaning, and arguably had no grammar or syntax, either. It was like looking at art from Mars.

The Abstract Expressionists were especially difficult for me. Jackson Pollock in particular, with his untamed, violent, and seemingly random spatters of paint and his rock star reputation, seemed to me to be the beginning of the end for art, the critics' exhibit A in the case that the debauchery of the 20th century was leading to the much-discussed decline and fall of Western civilization. The lesser-known Abstract Expressionists, from Pollock's counterparts in the action or gestural strain such as Hans Hofmann and William de Kooning, to the color field Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, all baffled me equally. Whether it was paint that seemed wildly thrown, splashed or dripped on the canvas, or broad expanses of color, Abstract Expressionism always left me asking Duchamp's question: Is this art?

Part of the reason it was so easy for me to write off the Abstract Expressionists is because, without close inspection, they seem easy to write off. The initial "I could have done that" reaction to Abstract Expressionists is almost universal, and will likely continue for generations to come no matter how ensconced their work becomes in the canon of Western art. Their penchant for executing their works on large canvases adds to the problem: you can see them from across the room and walk away without ever getting close enough to get caught in Pollock's enticing web or sink into Rothko's pools of color bobbing gently above and below the picture plane. Though the epic scale of these works has as much to say to the viewer at a distance of 30 feet as it does at 30 inches, it also requires that you experience the works at both of these distances: you must approach the canvases and allow yourself to be engulfed by it, to experience it as an enveloping world of line and color, before you can truly understand these paintings.

I chose to focus on Rothko because, as a color reactor, he immediately appealed to me in a way that gestural artists like Pollock or even Rothko's color field counterparts did not. His works had more depth to them, more space than I felt in the works of other color field Abstract Expressionists like Still. And his palette choices, particularly in the works that were based on dark blues and greens, reminded me of my own paintings, which obsessively focus on the sea at night.

Much of Rothko's early work from the 1920s through the 1940s, when his work began to increasingly focus mythical subjects, deals with figures, though even in these figurative works we can see evidence of the classic style that was to later become his hallmark. Look, for example, at 1927's "Beach Scene" (figure 1), in which you cannot help but find harbingers of the classic period's rectangles of color in the three bands of the sand, the sea, and the sky behind the four female nudes in the foreground, or at the unknown painting from the early 1930s (figure 2) where the figure of a man hunched over and playing a banjo seems to blur indistinctly into the background in the same way that his rectangles, with their fuzzy, luminous edges, would later float above the undertone of color from the classic works. But even though you can find evidence of his signature style in the early period (which ends around 1940), the work is largely of figures inhabiting the world of everyday life: cities, landscapes, and rooms.

But there came a time when Rothko felt compelled to abandon the figure: "It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes.... But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it." Here Rothko is referring to the increasing alienation that many felt in the fragmented modern world, especially in the wake of World War II, which caused the American-based artists of Rothko's generation to reject old traditions and values in the same way that the destructiveness of World War I had caused European artists a generation before to re-examine the way they were representing the world.

Rothko's move away from representational works towards a more abstract style began in the early 1940s, a period referred to as his transitional period. Here the subject matter of his works moves towards the mythical, employing titles like "Antigone" (figure 3), "Oedipus" (figure 4), and "Leda" which are inhabited by figures that are increasingly less recognizable as humans. By 1943, around the time of the famous statement written with Alfred Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, rectangular blocks of color have begun to assert themselves in Rothko's work, and from 1945 on they are always present in some form, although it will still take a few years before Rothko takes the final step of stripping away the extraneous material that contemporary viewers, knowing what is to come, might often see as getting in the way of the true Rothko work underneath.

The fanciful abstractions in these works are clearly inspired by the Surrealist automatism of Arshile Gorky (which was in turn heavily influenced by Kandinsky's attempts to free himself from form and paint from his unconscious), but that which seems so natural in Gorky's work feels forced in Rothko because we can feel the serene minimalism of Rothko's classic style straining to escape from the random blobs and squiggles. In an untitled 1945 work (figure 5), the abstract shapes laid over the rectangular bands of color are so spare, so sparse and minimal, that it's easy to see that Rothko himself was beginning to wonder if he really needed anything other than the richly textured and layered sheets of color that are relentlessly pushing themselves to the foreground of this painting. Another work titled "The Source" from 1945-1946 (figure 6) foreshadows the infamous "black paintings" that Rothko produced in the last two years of his life before his suicide. Again, to a viewer who knows those paintings and the despair that they evoke, the abstract shapes (figures?) that float in front of the barren landscape of desolation seem like a desecration, an unnecessary attempt at gaudy ornamentation.

By 1947, the rectangles of color had again receded below the surface of the visible canvas (although spiritually you can still feel their presence) and the abstract automatic lines and shapes had spread out into amorphous blobs of color that spread themselves slowly over the surface of the entire canvas. At their most transcendental, seen in untitled works from 1947 and 1948 (figure 7 and 8, respectively) and in "No. 1 (No. 18, 1948" from 1948-1949 (figure 9), the undefined slicks of color appear as shimmering liquid hues that bob gently in a reflecting pool situated in some Fauvist tropical wilderness raging with life and growth (the lower third of Gaugin's "Day of the Gods (Mahana No Atua)", which has abstract embryonic forms swirling in the sea, has some striking similarities to Rothko's paintings from this period).

The harder edged rectangles re-emerged in 1949, slowly becoming more defined elements in the formless pools of color and shape, but it is not until a series of paintings created in 1949 and shown together in the Parsons Gallery in 1950 that we see works that clearly prefigure what would come to be known as his classic style. "No. 1", "No. 2", "No. 3" (figure 10), "No. 5", "No. 6", "No. 7", and "No. 8" (figure 11) from that show all featured relatively clearly defined rectangles of color hovering above a larger color field. There are still works in this show that look back to the amorphous style of 1947-1948, but by 1950, there is no question that Rothko has entered his classic period.

Like almost everything surrounding a discussion of Rothko's work, the line between the transitional period and the classic period is fairly hazy; just as you can look at one of his classic works and say definitively "this area is part of the background and this area is part of a different colored rectangle", but you'd be hard-pressed to define the exact point on the canvas where the one gives way to the other, so, too, you can watch the progression of his work from 1949 to 1950 and see that Rothko is ever trending towards what was to become his defining style, but you can't point at one particular painting and say "this is his first classic work". You can make a case for any number of paintings from this period, but in the end, there is no defining work, no "a-ha!" moment where he finds his classic style.

Nevertheless, from this point forward, Rothko works almost exclusively in his classic style. The palette changes, the size, shape, and number of rectangles changes, and occasionally even the orientation of the canvas is shifted from a portrait to a landscape, but the works are unmistakably Rothko. He created hundreds of these paintings; it is almost impossible to imagine that an artist of Rothko's depth and vision could remain so focused on a particular style for so long without exhausting it, or that viewers could find something true and unique and inspiring about each individual painting, especially when confronted with what is essentially a barrage superficially similar works. But the fact that Rothko was able to express himself in this style for this long without losing the ability to breath life into each work, and that viewers continue to find something worthwhile and distinct about these canvases speaks to the power of Rothko's defining motif, the elemental potency of simple geometric shapes and vibrant colors (for examples of his classic work, see figures 12 and 13).

In reading about the Rothko's works, particularly the works from the classic period for which he is best known, you tend to encounter the same kinds of imagery, and even the same words, over and over: luminous, diaphanous, shimmering, ephemeral, radiant, hazy, watery, translucent. They are said to have an aura, or to create a mirage, or to be imbued with a soul. What is striking, given the apparent simplicity of the paintings—two or three rectangles of color floating near the picture place which is established by a larger field of color that encompasses the entire canvas, even wrapping itself around the edges—is how hard it is to describe one of Rothko's works once you really start looking at it.

Rothko was clearly influenced by the color theories advanced by another Abstract Expressionist, Hans Hofmann, who was also well known as a teacher and who helped bridge the gap not only between the gestural and color field Abstract Expressionists but also between Abstract Expressionism and the earlier European movements of Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism. Hofmann was known for his concept of "push and pull", the idea that you can create the illusion of depth simply by placing contrasting colors next to one another (as opposed to linear perspective, which creates depth by having objects decrease in size towards a single focal point and by the use of atmospheric effects). "Push-pull is at the heart of the color theory of Impressionists like Monet and Seurat, who created canvases that seemed to move and vibrate by placing short strokes or dots of contrasting colors next to one another. While Rothko did not study directly with Hofmann, Rothko's later work is perhaps the best example of how an artist can use the "push-pull" effect to create tension and depth on the picture plane using nothing but color.

Rothko also shared with Hofmann an affinity for music, which was a primal influence on his work (as it was for many abstract painters). Hofmann often gave his abstract pieces musical names ("Orchestral Dominance in Green", "String Quartet"), and he had very well-developed theories about the relationship of colors in paintings to notes in music:

Continuity of color development is achieved through successful, successive development of color the color scales. There are comparable to the tone scales in music. They can be played in Major or Minor. Each color scale follows again a rhythm entirely its own. The rhythmic development of the red scale differs from that of the blue scale or the yellow scale, etc. The development of the color scales spreads over the whole picture surface, and its orientation in relation to the picture surface is of utmost importance.

The formal development of the work and the color development are performed simultaneously. The color development leads thereby from one color scale to the other. Since every color can be shaded with any other color, an unlimited variation of shading within every color scale is possible. Although a red can be, in itself, bluish, greenish, yellowish, brownish, etc., its actual color-emanation in the pictorial totality will be the conditioned result of its relationship to all the other colors.

Any color shade within one color scale can become, at any moment, the bridge to any other color scale. This leads to an interwoven communion of color scales over the entire picture surface.

(Hans Hofmann, "The Color Problem in Pure Painting—Its Creative Origin," quoted in Goodman 110-111)

Whether he knew directly about Hofmann's ideas on color scales, it is clear that Rothko intuitively understood these concepts. Looking at the blurred edges of his rectangles, you can see almost infinite shifts between the color of the rectangles and the undertone of color the creates the foundation for the painting, and even within the rectangles and the background color wash (which from a distance can appear to be flat fields of color), you can find subtle variations in the hue and saturation that give the work a layered, textured feeling when viewed closely. In his essay on Rothko in Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Stephen Polcari notes that Rothko often played music while painting in his studio, and repeats one of Rothko's best known quotes: "I wanted to become a painter to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry" (Polcari 145). Polcari also notes that Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, a work Rothko was obsessed with, had a clear influence on Rothko's ideas about the relationship between music and painting:

For Nietzsche, music is a Dionysian, tragic art, its melody primal and universal, a vehicle for the rendering of elemental passion, primal images, and primordial unity among man, nature, and the universe. Music is antiparticular and antiphenomenal, in other words, like Rothko's work, abstract, direct, and concrete. (Polcari 145)

Music manages to be both completely abstract (there is no way for sound to be directly representational of the visual world) and completely visceral; it has the power to grab you and consume you, and it influences your emotions and your mood. Rothko wanted his viewers to have the same sort of experience while looking at his work:

I am not interested in relationship of color or form or anything else...I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point. (Polcari 144)

I would argue that he succeeds in this goal: as hard as it is to find a quiet spot in a museum where you can take the time to properly absorb one of Rothko's paintings, where you can allow yourself to become open to the sea of emotions and the universe of depth conjured up using only color on a flat picture plane, if you can manage to do so, it is easy to weep, or to become swept up in the same religious fervor that we see in Bernini's "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa".

Many art historians and critics have attempted to find meaning in Rothko's repeated use of the three rectangles, likening them to a landscape or seascape (land, horizon, sky or land, water, sky), the human body (head, torso, legs), or a window (two panes divided by a frame), and although these theories might give viewers another way to understand Rothko's works on an intellectual level, they are ultimately artificial constructs that are being applied to works that are intended to transcend rationalism. It's certainly possible to deconstruct them and create a historical, biographical, and cultural context for them, but does doing so add anything to the experience of sitting in front of one of the paintings and allowing yourself to be engulfed by it? In Rothko's classic period, painting, defined as the interaction of color and light on the picture plane of a canvas, has been so refined and purified that each work has become its own meditative space that is endowed with meaning both universal and individual by each viewer who allows him- or herself to inhabit it.

From 1950 to 1970, there are really only two significant deviations from the classic style. The first comes in the late 1950s when Rothko is given a commission to design a series of panels for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York. Beginning in 1958 and continuing through 1959, he paints a series of panels (figures 14 and 15) in dark maroons, browns, blacks, and purples that are in marked contrast to the almost Fauvist hues of the early classic period, when bright yellows, reds, oranges, and whites were prominent in Rothko's palette.

We also see a new shape motif emerging: rather than horizontally-oriented rectangles that seem to float above a larger color field, the Seagram murals frequently feature two-color canvases with a primary field of color covering the entire canvas with a single block of color floating above it with one or more "holes" cut into them so that you can see the primary wash of color in the center of the "higher" block of color. As a result, the imagery in the Seagram murals is dominated by openings: holes, doors, tunnels, windows, eyes. What lies beyond the threshold of these passages is implicitly brought to the works by the viewers, but it is hard to deny the feeling of being pulled into these works that is distinct from the emotions of the earlier classic works: as opposed to the sensation of floating in light and color evoked by rectangles hovering over the canvas, the Seagram murals seem to insistently pull at us, sucking us into a vortex, forcing us to confront the void.

The creation of more forceful, almost confrontational paintings was clearly intentional, reflecting his ambivalence about the appropriateness of the project and his antagonistic attitude towards the diners who were the audience for these works. He has a famous quote about this project—"I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room"—and it's clear that these works were meant to stand apart from his earlier meditative works. For whatever reason, Rothko wanted the Four Seasons patrons to be looking into the abyss during their meal, and the visceral bloodiness of the mural paintings ensured that the abyss would be staring right back with unblinking eyes.

Rothko eventually abandoned the Seagram project, deciding that a restaurant was not the proper setting for his paintings (though they are almost shockingly confrontational for compared to his earlier classic paintings, it is doubtful that they would have made much of an impression in the dimly lit interior of a restaurant; it's likely that they would have been seen merely as the expensive ornamentation that the Four Seasons wanted them to be), but the darker colors he employed during that period never entirely disappeared from his work thereafter, and in fact both the Seagram palette and the window/door motif was revisited for another series of murals painted in 1961 for Harvard University, and again for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, a permanent mural installation created in 1965 which provided the serene, meditative environment he'd always desired for his paintings.

Rothko's second major break from his classic style came in 1969 in a series called "the black paintings" (also known as the "Black on Grays", figures 16 and 17). In early 1968, Rothko suffered an aneurysm, and this event signaled the coming end of his life. In the fall of 1968, after he had recovered somewhat, and through 1969, Rothko embarked on a project to catalog all of his works, working with his assistants to diligently label, date, and provide orientation information for all the works in his possession, as if he felt a need to sum up his life's work and preserve it for posterity. In early 1969 he produced the first of his black paintings, which are characterized by a dark, almost flat field of color covering the upper half of the canvas (usually black, dark green, or dark blue) whose weight you can feel pressing down on the lighter lower half of the canvas (done in whites, light yellows, or light blues). There are no more hovering rectangles, just two opposing fields of color recalling the vast, desolate landscapes of the arctic tundra at night or the cold emptiness of the moon.

Rothko committed suicide in February 1970, slitting his arms and bleeding to death. His final works show a return to his classic style of hovering rectangles, but the palettes that he chose are telling: two of the final three are deep, dark blues and greens, colors traditionally associated with his periods of depression. The final canvas (figure 18) is done in rich, startling vermilions, and is brighter than anything he had done since his aneurysm. But it is not a color of happiness: it is the color of death, the same color as the blood that was to flow from his arms and leave him lifeless on the floor of his studio.

As I began to dig deeper into Rothko's work in preparation for my class presentation and this paper, as I tried to use the rational construct of research and analysis to construct a meaning for Rothko's paintings, I began to grow increasingly uneasy with the cold critical methods I was forced to employ. I felt like I was putting Rothko's work in a box, pinning and mounting it as a collector of insects would a butterfly. But unlike an entymologist, who has no problem destroying something in order to preserve it and document it for science, I was uneasy with building a narrative around these works; I felt was removing the life from them, and I didn't like it.

Rothko hated art critics, and he hated speaking about his work; he didn't want anyone, whether a learned art historian, a gallery owner, or even the painter himself, to impose any sort of structure and philosophy on his work. He intended for his works to be meditative pieces for which each viewer would create his or her own individual meaning. He wanted them to be universal, timeless, tragic, and heavy with their own internal gravity. I understood this intuitively the first time I looked on a Rothko canvas with a truly open mind, and after learning about his own feelings regarding commentary on his work, I strenuously resisted the urge to explain his work in the context of his personal life, to attach his biography to works that he intended and I felt to be outside of time and history. Nevertheless, it is hard to resist using Rothko's own words to bring further clarity to his work:

The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.... To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood. (Anfam, pp. 75-76)

Looking at Rothko's works in more or less chronological order (or at least the order the he decided to put them in when he started to catalog them in 1968), it is easy to see how germane this particular statement is to a discussion of Rothko's progression towards and through his classic style. Even from his earliest figurative works in the 1920s, we can see hints of the classic style, elements that will be used again and again in his art, sometimes distorted, sometimes seemingly abandoned, but always essentially present. Moving through the 1930s and into the 1940s, when he eventually gave up on the figure as a subject for his painting, we see a gradually reduction of Rothko's work, a stripping away of all excess material until we are left with the primal fields of color that were to occupy the second half of his career.

Attempting to write about the paintings of Mark Rothko is futile; we are using the blunt, clumsy instrument of language to try to capture works that have been purified and refined to the point where the only way to truly describe them is to stand in front of them and let your mind melt into the colors, to allow your consciousness to slip into a nebulous dream state as hazy as the edges of his rectangles which seem to melt into misty nothingness. Brian O'Doherty, in his essay on Rothko in American Masters, said that "Rothko's art utters a single word, insistently. But everyone hears a different word" (O'Doherty 192).

To reduce Rothko's paintings to a single word might be overly simplistic, but the essence of what O'Doherty is saying is correct. The typical three-rectangle composition may be better thought of as a haiku, a three-line minimalist composition elucidating a single idea that is nevertheless laden with layers of meaning, or a zen koan, an enigmatic riddle meant to be repeated over and over until a transcendental state is achieved. Rothko's paintings can be similarly experienced: it only takes a moment to take in the essence of the work, its basic colors and its composition, but you feel like you could spend a lifetime lost in the glowing edges and richly textured brushwork that creates so many tonal variations that you would find it difficult to find even a square inch of the canvas that holds a single color.

My initial supposition that artists like Rothko were leading to a de-evolution of art was essentially correct, but now I choose to see that as a positive thing. By abandoning academic, figurative, and representational traditions that fettered works of art to the time and place of the artists who created them, the Abstract Expressionists gave us timeless works that transcend the lives of their creators, the comments of their critics, and the entire culture that gave birth to them. Rothko's paintings in particular, with their focus on pure color and the picture plane, create a space that is outside of history, a place where each of us can enter and discover what it means to be human. The reduction of painting to its purest essence allows Rothko's works to become universal, and to hold ever deeper layers of meaning; they become mirrors for the tragedy, triumph, pain, and sadness that dwells within each of us.

Anfam, David. Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven: Yale University Press; Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998.

Goodman, Cynthia (Editor). Hans Hofmann. Munich: Prestel-Verlag; New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990.

O'Doherty, Brian. American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art. New York: Dutton, 1982.

Polcari, Stephen. Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

What a wonderful essay you have written about Rothko. It was an absolute joy to read. As far as I'm concerned, you've nailed both the artist and your reactions to his work, and while he'd have been pissed off about the former, he'd have loved the later. Course grade = A+

Wow. Another freaking A+. Either the professors in this program give these out like candy or I'm a bigger genius than I thought. Maybe I can talk the program head into letting me use one of my A pluses to balance out the A minus I was unfairly given in my Artificial Human class this summer so I can have that perfect 4.0 GPA.

OK, in some perverse way I enjoy this evolving connection between my birthday and Elvis's. Maybe it's my love of percodan and fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

He's just kidding. He hates fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.