by Lawrence Bush on September 24, 2011
Painter Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in Russia (contemporary Latvia) on this date in 1903. He came to the U.S. at age 10 and acquired English as his fourth language. Rothko became a Yale drop-out and entered into painting through the tutelage of Arshile Gorky (at the New School) and Max Weber (at the Art Students League). His first one-man shows came in 1932; soon after, he was embedded in a community of Jewish expressionist artists (“The Ten”) who protested the Whitney Museum’s tendency to equate “American painting and literal painting.” Rothko was a WPA artist in the late 1930s. As the U.S. approached World War II, he became a U.S. citizen (for fear that foreign-born Jews in the U.S. might be deported into the hands of Nazism), changed his name from Rothkowitz to Rothko, and worked to keep his community of artists free of political “taint” by disassociating from leftist activity. By the late 1940s he was creating the rectangular fields-of-color paintings for which he became internationally famous. His success, however, seemed to evoke in him worsening depression, desire for seclusion, and protestations that his artwork was misunderstood or valued only for trendy reasons. He committed suicide in 1970 at age 66.
“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” —Mark Rothko
by Lawrence Bush on April 15, 2011
Arnold Neustadter, who partnered with a self-taught Danish engineer, Hildaur Neilson, to invent the Rolodex, died on this date in 1996 at 85. Neustadter was the son of a box manufacturer and founder of Zephyr American, a company that also created the Autodex, a phone directory gadget, the Swivodex, an inkwell that did not spill, the Punchodex, a paper hole puncher, and the Clipodex, a device that attached to a stenographer’s knee. The enduring product was the Rolodex, launched in the 1950s, which became so ubiquitous that it needs no description. Even with the advent of the personal computer, close to 10 million Rolodexes are sold each year. Neustadter became a philanthropist and art collector, with a collection that included works by Chagall, Picasso and Henry Moore.
“He was a very organized man. He was always one for advancing things that he thought were done in a clumsy way.” —Dorothy Neustadter
by Lawrence Bush on March 31, 2011
Today is Edible Book Day, conceived in 1999 by Judith A. Hoffberg, a librarian, curator and expert on mail art and artists books. Edible Book Day festivals, launched in 2000 by Hoffberg and artist Béatrice Colon, have been held since then in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, United States (twenty-six states), Romania, Russia, Singapore, and Sweden. The creations are photographed and archived at books2eat.com before being consumed. Hoffberg died in January, 2009 at 74.
“The whole field of artist books became my life, and I wanted to share it with all of you. Although marginal at the beginning, it has grown into a movement, a new chapter in art history.” —Judith A. Hoffberg
by Lawrence Bush on March 19, 2011
The Nazis burned some 5,000 artworks that they had labeled “degenerate” in the courtyard of Berlin’s fire station on this date in 1939. Seven hundred of these paintings, drawings and sculptures, rounded up from museums and galleries throughout Germany in a thorough purge of modernism (including Bauhaus, Dada, Expressionism, and Cubism), had been displayed at a “Degenerate Art Exhibit” in Munich in 1937. Although children had been banned from viewing the exhibit, it had drawn three times more people than the Nazis’ “Great German Art Exhibition,” which had been approved by Hitler and was on display just a few hundred yards away. Only a few Jewish artists had contributed significantly to modernism in Germany (and only six of 112 artists in the “degenerate” show were Jewish), yet modern art in all its forms was proscribed by the Nazis as un-German and and reflective of Jewish “racial degeneracy.”
“As soon as I have carried out my program for Germany, I shall take up painting. I feel that I have it in my soul to become one of the great artists of the age and that future historians will remember me not for what I have done for Germany, but for my art.”
—Adolf Hitler
Painter Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in Russia (contemporary Latvia) on this date in 1903. He came to the U.S. at age 10 and acquired English as his fourth language. Rothko became a Yale drop-out and entered into painting through the tutelage of Arshile Gorky (at the New School) and Max Weber (at the Art Students League). His first one-man shows came in 1932; soon after, he was embedded in a community of Jewish expressionist artists (“The Ten”) who protested the Whitney Museum’s tendency to equate “American painting and literal painting.” Rothko was a WPA artist in the late 1930s. As the U.S. approached World War II, he became a U.S. citizen (for fear that foreign-born Jews in the U.S. might be deported into the hands of Nazism), changed his name from Rothkowitz to Rothko, and worked to keep his community of artists free of political “taint” by disassociating from leftist activity. By the late 1940s he was creating the rectangular fields-of-color paintings for which he became internationally famous. His success, however, seemed to evoke in him worsening depression, desire for seclusion, and protestations that his artwork was misunderstood or valued only for trendy reasons. He committed suicide in 1970 at age 66.
