small world

I stood looking at the Rauschenberg in absolute wonder. “This piece is amazing,” I thought to myself. I could tell the girl standing right next to me was thinking the same thing. She looked at me and we both smiled. I turned and walked over to the guard. “Can I take a picture?” I said dangling my camera phone between my thumb and forefinger.

“Sure” said the guard, “go ahead.” I walked back over, flipped the phone open and pressed the camera button. The crack of the sound effect built into the phone filled the gallery.

“I didn’t know we could do that!” exclaimed the girl.
“Apparently we can,” I said, nodding towards the guard.
“My girlfriend will be so excited” she said, pointing to another girl across the room. “She’s really inspired by Rauschenberg.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Texas” she said.
“Small world. I am too.”
The second girl joined us and took over the conversation. “I am an artist.” She said matter-of-factly.
“I am too. In fact I am here doing my research for my MFA Thesis.”
“What school do you go to?” I told her and you could see her eyes widen. “No kidding. My aunt teaches there!”
“What department?”
“Art.”
I looked at her for a minute. “Is your aunt Barbara?”
“Oh my gosh! Yes!”
“I know your aunt very well. She’s on the graduate faculty. I speak with her all the time.”

We exchanged names, and I gave her my business card. “I can’t wait to tell aunt Barbara about this.”
Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. “Look, it’s been great meeting you.” We shook hands and I dashed into the next gallery. It was full of Pop art from the mid 60’s. I hate pop art and moved on to the next room, and then the next. I saw an Antonio Tapies that was stunning, and then I saw two more.

I lingered a bit then turned the corner into the next hall, and would have kept going but stopped short. The room was full of no less than 10 Mark Rothko’s. I love Mark Rothko. Pretentious, arrogant, and full of radiant color, they were stunning. There would be no dashing through this gallery. The moment had to be savored.

I looked at the dates on the first cards. They were all dated in the late 1950’s. Superb examples of his color field work in its prime. Here were examples of the artists work when his was at the height of his power. Huge canvases painted with simple rectangles of color that seemed to glow and rise off the surface of the picture plane. There is a kind of transcendental experience one has when staring at Rothko for a substantial period of time. It cannot be rushed. The color begins to engulf you, even as the floating geometric shapes usher you into another realm without time or form. It is a place of pure feeling.

Slowly I moved from canvas to canvas drinking them up like bee nectar. I flowed them around the room, unconscious of my surroundings. There was no time for idle chitchat or discovered lost connections here. Here was a monument to genius, and standing in front of these canvases I felt for a moment what it must have been like to have that driving passion to create these colossal canvases.

As a traversed each canvas my mind was rocked with magentas and violets, ochre’s and reds. Till at last I came to the last painting and was completely overwhelmed. This painting was different, something altogether new. A large black filed atop a cooler grey. The artist fingerprints were clearly visible in the lower register, but the black was formless, unbroken, a perfect void. I looked at the card on the wall. 1970. Rothko killed himself in February of 1970. Was this the last painting he ever made?
I stared into the black for a moment. “He’s confronting his mortality.” I thought. I could feel the darkness tugging on something primordial. It was drawing me ever deeper in. “This is so depressing” I thought. “No wonder he killed himself. I would have too if I painted this.”

I looked at the playful gestures in the gray paint. “Was it enough to create this? Or would it never be enough?” I felt a kind of closeness with this man who died a mere month after I had been born; a kind of intimacy that wells up out of human understanding. I looked over my shoulder. The girls had just entered the gallery. You could see them rocking on their heels. I knew what they were feeling too. I had just been there. I decided to walk over and share my discovery with them. “Just once more, and quickly” I thought “And then I am getting out of here.”