{"id":306,"date":"2015-05-12T14:22:24","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T14:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/?p=306"},"modified":"2021-04-06T15:00:47","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T15:00:47","slug":"the-many-lives-of-pink-and-white-over-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/the-many-lives-of-pink-and-white-over-red\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Lives of \u00ab\u00a0Pink and White over Red\u00a0\u00bb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=\u00a0\u00bb309&Prime; img_size=\u00a0\u00bblarge\u00a0\u00bb alignment=\u00a0\u00bbcenter\u00a0\u00bb]<style>.ld_spacer_6a91440947e9e{height:30px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a91440947e9e\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A book tour offers great opportunities to enrich the book that is being presented. How challenging to listen to readers, public, journalists, curators who illuminate the text with their comments, questions and interpretations! Such was the case when I first presented<em> Sartre <\/em>in Montreal. I got to understand that, in the Quebec of the nineteen sixties, the philosopher\u2019s books played the role of genuine tools against the Catholic church and the British establishment, in the mind of so many young intellectuals; from this true episode in sociology of reception, I wrote a travelog for <em>Le Nouvel Observateur<\/em> which in turn became a whole chapter in the <em>Que sais-je <\/em>that I was commissioned in 2005, on the occasion of Sartre\u2019s centenial.<\/p>\n<p>Travelling with Mark Rothko has been way more interesting that I had ever imagined. The first treat was those marvelous paintings that I had not seen in real life yet, and which sort of carry the artist\u2019s voice, the artists\u2019s memory with them: their date, their color, their size, their vibration is commentary on the period that Rothko is confronting. I have a few favorites, such as this orange one, in Bob Meyerhoff\u2019s collection, which echoes an Ellsworth Kelly piece, just behind it, in another room.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column]<style>.ld_spacer_6a9144094a08f{height:30px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a9144094a08f\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[vc_single_image image=\u00a0\u00bb308&Prime; img_size=\u00a0\u00bblarge\u00a0\u00bb alignment=\u00a0\u00bbcenter\u00a0\u00bb]<style>.ld_spacer_6a9144094aac9{height:30px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a9144094aac9\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I was also mesmerized by <em>Pink and White over Red<\/em> from 1957 in a very big format (105 x 116 inches or else 2,60 x 3,00 meters). It belongs to the Anderson Collection, on the Stanford campus, where I spoke in a conversation with Connie Woolf for a group of collectors, including the Anderson family, just in front of the painting \u2013 a very daunting experience. \u201cWorks of art live many lives\u201d, historian Neil Harris once wrote about Seurat\u2019s <em>La Grande Jatte<\/em> at the Chicago Art Institute. I thought about the many lives of <em>Pink and White over Red<\/em> when I walked up the very spacious stairs of the museum facing Clyfford Still\u2019s majestuous <em>1957-J No. 1 (PH-142)<\/em>. I thought about the many lives of <em>Pink and White over Red<\/em> when I discussed Rothko\u2019s friendship with Still in the years 1943-1947, and their mutual influence when they worked so close to each other in San Francisco. \u201cWhat was there about last summer which seems now to have been so magical?\u201d Rothko wrote back from New York, after teaching a whole summer at the California School of Fine Arts. San Francisco \u201cis<em> unspeakably <\/em>beautiful &amp; the weather perfect.\u201d I thought about the many lives of <em>Pink and White over Red<\/em> when reading Rothko\u2019s praise of the city and when I commented on the artist incessant shuttling between New York and somewhere else. Definitely, San Francisco always remained a nurturing utopia in the life of Mark Rothko, against New York that he once described as a city of \u201cshop-keeping mentalities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGo &amp; see the Harvard Murals at 3:30 pm, and be sure to be there when they turn the lights off\u201d, Harry Cooper, the curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery, had warned me with a cryptic message. I did go to the Harvard Museums with my friend Larissa Buchholz at 3:30 pm to see the exhibition of Rothko\u2019s Harvard Murals that opened last November. Produced in 1962, for the Holyoke Center, they have a sad history: their color faded, their location proved to be the wrong place, and they were put in storage for too long. But a new digital technology brought out by computer specialists at MIT was able to restaure their original color by projecting light a few hours a day on the damaged places and by compensating the loss. But what a mesmerizing moment when at 4 pm, one by one, the lights are turned off, and when, one by one, each panel fades away! During the last decade of his life, Rothko shifted to an entirely new phase: he got interested with issues of light, of reflectance, of interaction with the public. It is precisely during this period, in the sixties, that he produced the Harvard Murals. But it is today that, through the talent of the digital technology experts, Rothko\u2019s preoccupation with light is reaching out to us again.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column]<style>.ld_spacer_6a9144094b534{height:30px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a9144094b534\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[vc_single_image image=\u00a0\u00bb307&Prime; img_size=\u00a0\u00bblarge\u00a0\u00bb alignment=\u00a0\u00bbcenter\u00a0\u00bb][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column]<style>.ld_spacer_6a9144094bf52{height:20px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a9144094bf52\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">par <strong>Annie Cohen-Solal<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column]<style>.ld_spacer_6a9144094c9ba{height:30px;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ld-empty-space ld_spacer_6a9144094c9ba\"><span class=\"liquid_empty_space_inner\"><\/span><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A book tour offers great opportunities to enrich the book that is being presented. How challenging to listen to readers, public, journalists, curators who illuminate the text with their comments, questions and interpretations! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":307,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anniecohensolal.com\/sitev2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}