James Parsonage

Tag: history

Mark Rothko – Seagram Murals

Rothko’s Seagram Murals are a rejection of the institutions that birthed them. Their scale, colour and architecture produce durational feedback that echoes long after you have viewed them. A sigh, conviction and altered mood are expected. What the viewer is presented with isn’t a window, but a mirror – a tarnished one at that. Within this room, what is mirrored is a certain finality. A finality that makes you look inward.

Both light and sound throughout the room is absorbed. The edges bleed into one another. Tones of blood, dried. Shades of coal, purple culminate in aftermath, spent energy and bruising. The colours, alongside the scale, create a silence. A silence that isn’t just heard but seen. Rothko brings the quiet of this room into being. As if you are walking into a confessional chamber. What these works conjure up is what the viewer carries with them into the room. The finality here is the sense that it is just you in the room and that you are alone. No beauty or inspiration takes hold. This is a room for contemplation.

These pieces were commissioned for an elite dining room. Yet what we see here are sarcophagus-like shapes that dominate the canvases. Painted tombstones. These pieces would not complement a diner’s experience. Diners would be digesting their own emotions, preoccupations, mental states in front of these paintings. This was Rothko’s intention.

The murals are a rejection of the idea that scale, luxury and productivity yield meaning within our lives. Rothko outwardly contests the economic and patronage institutions that commissioned them. These institutions value display, performance, visibility. Rothko sees the tragic failure of this kind of spectacle to satisfy the psyche, bringing this idea to canvas. Instead of comforting the diners, these pieces reassert inwardness. The material realm does not hold the answers. The answers, according to these paintings, are contained within.

What strikes me most about these works is the alienation, the anomie that submerges the viewer. These pieces negate our surroundings. The combination of form and colour creates a finality of presence through this negation. It is this void that the grandeur of modernity tries to conceal. For Rothko, only interior truths can face the dilemma of our estrangement and alienation. These works, displayed together, provide the medium to achieve that.

The Seagram Murals highlight the value Rothko placed on the deeper, more meaningful questions. The kind of questions that confront us. That is what the viewer is made to reconcile when faced with these canvases: Who are you?

Disclaimer

Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.

References

Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fischer, John. “Conversations with Rothko.” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1959.

Morley, Simon. Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Thames & Hudson, 2003.

O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. University of California Press, 1976.

Rothko, Mark. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. Edited by Christopher Rothko, Yale University Press, 2004.

Rodman, Selden. Conversations with Artists. Capricorn Books, 1961.

Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. Harper & Row, 1970.

Tate Modern. Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals. Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Publishing, 2008.

December 26, 2025
Jackson Pollock – Number 31

What does it mean to be free? This is the first question I ask myself when confronted with Jackson Pollock’s Number 31, 1950. Freedom here is presented as a paradox – yet Pollock’s work embodies the answer.

In Number 31, there is no clear centre, no beginning, no end. Pollock’s psychoanalytically driven, restless and uncontainable energy create a woollen surface – a rhythmic scrambling of paint where chaotic swirls, dense layering, and the absence of a focal hierarchy generate a sense of infinity.

The artist’s signature style – his freedom of hand – abandons the brush in favour of flicking paint: an act of rebellion against the institutionalised notions that long characterised European composition, Renaissance balance, and academic figuration. Number 31 does not raise questions of beauty; it is a question of what it means to be liberated from the constructs that defined art before the Abstract Expressionist paradigm took root.

Karl Kasten notes Gaugin challenged the meanings of contour and the physics of line; Cezanne dismantled conventions of positive and negative space within composition; and Van Gogh disintegrated the picture plane through impasto, testing the limits of colour, value, and texture. Together, these artists broke down the optical illusions that had defined painting. Pollock goes further – his work is more liberated than his predecessors, rejecting illusion altogether in favour of pure action.

Yet within this apparent infinity lies containment. When we look to the edges of the canvas, we encounter sparseness, restraint. The paradox unfolds before us: despite the freedom of Pollock’s gestures, there is an underlying control that confines the rhythmic chaos within the structures of the canvas itself.

This formal paradox mirrors the cultural context from which the painting emerged. Abstract expressionism was promoted by American institutions as ‘free art’, a visual emblem of liberal democracy in contrast to the realism of different regimes. The freedom displayed on the canvas was, paradoxically, a freedom supported – and defined – by the mainframe of institutions. The edges of the canvas thus become symbolic of these boundaries: the same structures that legitimised Pollock’s expression also contained it.

Freedom, then, is not pure chaos, nor pure control. It is the dynamic tension between the two – the space where discipline and spontaneity can coexist. Number 31 becomes both a personal and cultural revelation: the point where artistic instinct meets the limits of form and ideology.

This paradox, which mirrors the human condition itself, invites a deeper question – is freedom truly possible without constraint? Pollock’s Number 31 does not answer this outright, but it makes the question visible. In doing so, it transforms freedom from an abstract ideal into a lived, embodied experience of possibility.

Disclaimer:

Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.

References

Pollock’s Paradigm (2017) Pollock’s Paradigm [online PDF]. Yumpu. Available at: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/59730787/pollocks-paradigm (Accessed: 5 October 2025).

December 26, 2025
Piet Mondrian – Broadway Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian – Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942-43. Photograph taken by author. Museum of Modern Art 2023.

Each artist has their ‘absolute’. For Mondrian, the ‘absolute’ was defined by universal harmony. His Neoplasticism that is characteristic of Broadway Boogie Woogie concerned the harmony of relations in nature. This paradigm was his logical progression from Cubism’s fragmentation – where multiple perspectives collapsed into a unified, singular perspective.

Set in New York City – a place of differences, opposites, constant motion. This piece is an abstraction of the city’s traffic system. What is expressed through this uniform and organised structure is the equilibrium that takes root despite the inherent diversity concentrated in urban life. The traffic grid system is Mondrian’s testing ground to prove this equilibrium – to prove the ‘absolute’ can be achieved in a place defined by diversity.

Right angles, pulses of primary colour – red, yellow, blue – work their way through the picture plane. But there is a technical progression in his New York series. The technical innovation moves away from the definitive black lines that once enforced the separation between the white panels and coloured panels. The effect is to produce some of his most joyful and rhythmic works.

The removal of black lines from this work puts greater emphasis both on the right-angles and on colour. Definition and gradation are now achieved by juxtaposing colours against one another. Line is formed by contrast. Emphasising each colour’s place against one another, this contrast ties them together. The differing colour now becomes structural rather than complementary to the work.

The ‘absolute’ Mondrian sought was becoming closer. The transcendence from black lines and into pure colour denotes a progression in his oeuvre. Considering the artist’s occupation with Theosophy and Hindu philosophy; The right-angled grids symbolised differentiation, where multiplicity emerges from unity. The colour fields represent pure energies – the vibrational play of the absolute. Their balance within this canvas symbolises the reconciliation, the harmonising, of the many with the one, the absolute. Thus, revealing the unity of Brahman through calculated geometry of line and colour.

Brahman is said to be the undivided, infinite consciousness that underlies all phenomena in our existence. A unifying metaphysical reality. Brahman is not about unity in sameness but unity in differences. Light and dark, motion and stillness, matter and spirit. These are not contradictions, but manifestations of the same realities. This is the metaphysical principle that underlies Mondrian’s Neoplasticism. In Broadway Boogie Woogie each element is dependent on each other.

The differences in colour create the effect of separation. Separation that is dependent on each colour against one another in order to emphasise, or prove, their importance. Their oppositional forces prove to be a unifying force that joins them as well as separates them. Separation itself becomes unity. And that unity from opposites achieves the universal harmony that Mondrian sought to establish.

Disclaimer

Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.

December 26, 2025
Kaljo Põllu – Sadness

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Karl Marx determined that it is not ourselves that manifest our own consciousness. But instead, it is the institutional mainframes that surround us that determine our consciousness. Põllu’s Sadness highlights this antagonism, confronting the binaries of liberalism and authoritarianism against one another.

Põllu’s work was born during the period of the Soviet occupation of Estonia; a period marked by ideological surveillance, censorship and the suppression of national and individual expression. But the antagonism that we see in this piece is a double entendre – one that confronts both liberalism and authoritarianism simultaneously. Whilst it directly critiques authoritarian control, it also implicates liberal capitalism, revealing how both systems manufacture consciousness through different modalities of conditioning.

At its core, what is communicated in this piece, despite the regimes in which we exist, our consciousness is never sovereign; it is produced. A product of the institutional realities in which we inhabit. What we see across the picture plane is a vinyl inscribed with “His Masters Voice”. This echoes the propaganda models pursued by the Soviets, yet it also references a Western music label that evokes the seductive machinery of capitalist media. A duality. The vinyl appears to have hands which are massaging specific points on the arm. As if the music being played, or “His Masters Voice”, knows exactly what to say and when to say it. In a word, conditioning. It is a metaphor for how mass culture and political messaging infiltrate the nervous system, turning human sensitivities into a site of conditioning.

This conditioning holds a duality. That both capitalist and authoritarian systems of control condition their subjects in their own ways. Albeit the way in which this conditioning manifests is simply marketed and sold differently. Returning to the piece’s namesake, Sadness, perhaps Põllu was confronting the reality that we aren’t free under either regime type. Echoing the claim made by Rousseau, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. This Sadness that Põllu communicates is one that could well characterise all our entire existences, the realisation that our supposed liberation, too, may in fact be another form of captivity.

Disclaimer:

Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.

December 26, 2025
Lee Krasner – Gothic Landscape

Suffocation. A dense tangle of thick black gestural strokes, poles and circles jut against white and pastel tones. From the left and right side there are a set of opposites; dark and light contrasting against one another respectively. Krasner creates a set of binaries through both tone and structure. Light against dark, order against chaos, freedom against constraint. The overall effect is a violent rupture against our vision. The thick black poles slow down the movement of the eye creating a spatial hierarchy, separating each part of the canvas. This is the ‘push and pull’ method characteristic of Hans Hoffman’s works, Krasner’s mentor.

Yet there is a marked difference between Hoffman’s work and Krasner’s. This difference is defined by their palettes. Hoffman can be seen to deploy primary colours. Krasner’s, on the other hand, feature an austere range of colours; black, white, neutral pastels. The energy Hoffman creates through colour is displaced in Krasner’s work. Instead, energy is created by way of the violence and contortion of form on the canvas. This difference in palette invites a deeper question regarding binaries. One that revolves around gender and the experience of female artists within the Abstract Expressionist paradigm.

Where Hoffman explores primary colour, Jackson Pollock, Krasner’s husband, explored gestural freedom through automatism. The work by Pollock that is mirrored most in Gothic Landscape (1962) is Blue Poles (1952). Within this work there are harshly imposed poles that punctuate the canvas horizontally, creating a structural rhythm and tension. These poles create the same existential effect of binaries – chaos against order, freedom against constraint. Yet despite these tensions, Pollock’s freedom through automatism characterises the picture plain. In equal measure, Hoffman’s deployment of primary colour represents a freedom of palette. Within Krasner’s work, form is defined by constriction and suffocation which govern the viewer’s experience. The question that is created is whether the institutional confines surrounding these artists ultimately presented a different set of realities marked by gender.

In the Cold War art world, the institutions surrounding Abstract Expressionism were both patriotic and patriarchal. Pollock’s myth was institutionally cultivated as a symbol of American individualism and masculine power. Krasner, though equally sophisticated, was structurally confined to the periphery: the ‘wife-artist’. Krasner communicates the same freedoms and constraints that Pollock does, yet when filtered through gendered institutions, that freedom represents struggle. Krasner’s thick, suffocating layers depict psychic compression of operating inside the same institutions that Pollock does.

Both psyches emerge from the same formative mix of modernist education, American individualism, existential post-war trauma, but are modulated differently by institutional mediators of gender roles, visibility economies and art market patriarchy. Pollock found resonance within those institutions that rewarded excess. Krasner was shaped by constraint, producing a form of controlled chaos that critiques the very systems that exalted her husband.

Krasner’s Gothic Landscape is not merely expression but systemic diagnosis. Her work exposes how institutional hierarchies translate into psychic form. It recasts the mythology of Abstract Expressionism: what appeared as chaos in Pollock becomes critique in Krasner, a visual philosophy of constrained freedom.

Disclaimer:

Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.

December 26, 2025