INTRODUCTION

Concluding a recent visit to the Tate Britain to view Mark Rothko’s later paintings, the Seagram Murals, I found that my path of departure sent me through one of the museum’s shops. Walking through racks of merchandise on my way to the street entrance at the shop’s far end, I could not help but notice a display of postcards, for one of them struck me as a travesty. It reproduced one of the paintings I had just visited, Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1959). The postcard reduced Rothko’s complex wash of maroon shades to a blotchy yet otherwise uniform dark red as background to a central, black rectangle. Rothko’s subtlety was lost, replaced by an image more akin to Kasimir Malevich’s geometric suprematism than Rothko’s true antecedent, J. M. W. Turner’s nuanced studies of clouds and light. Moments before, I’d been impressed by the museum’s display of Turner’s Three Seascapes (c. 1827) in close proximity to the Seagram Murals. Now, faced with crude color reproduction and with Rothko’s 15 feet reduced to 6 inches, the Rothko-Turner comparison was visually inexplicable. As Robert Motherwell observed when eulogizing Rothko, his “cooler or darker pictures (those with … earth colors and blacks)” feature “a luminescent glow from within … on a sublime scale.” Motherwell was the not the first to remark on Rothko’s combination of luminosity and sublime scale; he likely knew that his description of Rothko echoes a celebrated 1961 essay by art critic Robert Rosenblum – which, incidentally, includes an illustration of the Rothko-Turner parallel. Rothko had himself praised Rosenblum’s analysis, particularly its astute reliance on Edmund Burke’s observation, “Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime.”

Consistent with Burke’s remark, the postcard’s problem goes beyond the loss of physical scale. The drastic reduction strips the image of visual nuance and so, too, of luminescence. As a representational vehicle, a postcard cannot provide the perceptual base that supports these aesthetic effects. Together, these alterations conspire to rob the representation of any hint of the sublimity of Rothko’s painting. The process of representation drains the experience of its central rationale in providing visual access to the particular work of art.