Long Spells of Looking

Peter Campbell

  • Mark Rothko edited by Jeffrey Weiss
    Yale/National Gallery of Art, Washington, 352 pp, £40.00, April 1998, ISBN 0 300 07505 7
  • Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas by David Anfam
    Yale/National Gallery of Art, Washington, 708 pp, £75.00, August 1998, ISBN 0 300 07489 1

There is a picture of Mark Rothko taken at his East Hampton studio in 1964. He is sitting on one of those solid wooden beach chairs that stand around on the porches of Long Island summer cottages, looking at one of his own paintings as one might look at the sea, patiently pursuing all that his picture has in it. He was famous for this: for attending on the effect of each change in the angle or intensity of light, for looking close up and far off. In the catalogue for the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (it goes on to Paris in January) Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty write:

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