“I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions”—Mark Rothko.
The enigmatic allure of Mark Rothko’s glowing color fields has captivated audiences ever since their appearance in the early 1950s. A pivotal figure in 20th-century art, Rothko sought to go beyond mere visual representation and immerse viewers in transcendent experiences where the boundaries between art and observer dissolve.
While Rothko’s signature style seems far removed from the world of wine, a closer look reveals intriguing parallels between his artistic vision and the aesthetics of wine. In their visceral, affective capacity to stimulate thought, memory, mood, and the imagination, both Rothko’s paintings and wine can be experienced and understood as sensuous portals that open and illuminate our being-in-the-world. The following essay, approached in the spirit of the genre’s French progenitor, Michel de Montaigne, as “a try,” explores the resonances between the two—not to equate wine and art, but to propose that the aesthetic experience of wine bears telling analogies to that of Rothko’s oeuvre.1 When put in dialogue, the two can elevate and illuminate each other as distinct yet kindred forms of revealing the world.
The Rothko retrospective of a generation
A recent retrospective devoted to Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to trace the evolution of Rothko’s artistic journey, a lifelong quest to give form to the deepest wellsprings of human feeling. With 115 works spanning all four floors of the Frank Gehry-designed glass schooner docked at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the exhibition was a monumental undertaking. The previous full-scale Rothko exhibition was 25 years ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, generally the best city in the world to see this artist. Meanwhile, the price of Rothko’s hazy abstractions has only drifted skyward. One was going for $40 million (£32 million) at Paris+ (the Art Basel spin-off) during the exhibition. Rothko’s 1961 Orange, Red, Yellow sold for $86.9 million (£53.8 million) in 2012, the highest price ever fetched by a piece of contemporary art at auction—until a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold for $119.9 million (£74 million).
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Despite Rothko’s international acclaim, the art-breathing public of France, curiously, had not seen much of his work until the recent exhibition, which generated a tremendous response. From the first day to the last of the four-month run, the gallery was packed. Sessions were booked, and omnipresent queues extended in wind, rain, and hail through the Paris winter and spring. Along with the French, people from the far corners of the world flew in specifically for the event.
Tracing Rothko’s career—from the early portraits and edgy urban realism of the 1930s, to his surrealist paintings from the 1940s—the exhibition progressed to the immense “color fields” of the 1950s and ’60s for which he is best known. Punctuated by quotes expressing his philosophy and artistic vision, the exhibition showed Rothko constantly pushing the boundaries of pictorial language, driven by a search to express that which “cannot be said and yet is felt so intensely.” He often referred to his paintings as “moods,” and seeing such an extensive collection is probably the clearest way to understand his work and life.
Becoming Rothko
A towering figure of American 20th-century painting, Rothko is held up, alongside Jackson Pollock, as a prime exponent of Abstract Expressionism, which came of age in New York in the 1940s and ’50s. Rothko made his name with a paradoxical singularity: expressing “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom,” exclusively through abstraction. Born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903, in Dvinsk (then within the Russian Empire, now Latvia), into a cultured Jewish family, he attended a Talmudic school. There is something quintessentially American in the experience of Mark Rothko, who arrived in Portland, Oregon, as an immigrant at the age of ten, not speaking a word of English, and less than a decade later found himself attending Yale on a scholarship. Although memories and impressions of his homeland certainly remained, Rothko later remarked that he did not even remember Russian and was no longer able to speak or read the language. After only a year at Yale, he left for New York, finding his vocation as an artist and joining the Art Students League. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1938, taking the name Mark Rothko some two years later.
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Following World War II, the axis of the art world shifted from Europe to the United States, partly because many important European artists—including Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, and Piet Mondrian—left Europe. But it was the generation of artists like Rothko and his teacher Arshile Gorky, who had immigrated earlier (Rothko in 1913 and Gorky in 1920), who forged a new language in painting that came to be referred to as Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School.
In the early 1940s, believing that he had failed to represent the human figure without leaving it “mutilated,” Rothko stopped painting and devoted himself to writing a manuscript, published posthumously as The Artist’s Reality, before exploring new pictorial forms. Within the tumultuous wartime context, his work evolved. Along with other painters—such as Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman—Rothko questioned the subject in art, and he sought to create new myths and meanings. This resulted in surrealist paintings inspired by his reading of Nietzsche and Aeschylus, depicting archaic heroes, deformed and duplicated, mutant monsters, and subconscious dreamscapes. In the years 1946–48, Rothko moved decisively toward abstraction, with the paintings known as “multiforms.” Here, dense colored fields—initially overrun with organic elements—evolved toward more structured, minimalist compositions, thinner layers, and large vertical formats.
By the early 1950s, Rothko’s paintings became immediately recognizable: two or three floating rectangles superimposed on one another, playing with an infinite range of tones and value. Within a format of extreme simplicity, we see the painter’s interest in orchestrating contrasts. The blending of luminous colors gives the canvas a mysterious, breath-like, evanescent glow, especially as the canvases grew larger. The enlarged formats produce an immersive, enveloping effect, creating the personal experience Rothko sought. “Since I am involved with the human element, I want to create a state of intimacy. Large pictures take you into them. Scale is of tremendous importance to me—human scale.”
When you get close to one of his paintings, Rothko said, “You are in it. It isn’t something you command.” He was adamant that his paintings needed to be viewed at a maximum of 18in (45cm) away. Yet while you are absorbed, you’re not swallowed. You’re just close enough to get past the borders, and see the colors illuminate and dissolve into one another. The seamless color transitions can make an abrupt paint drop or errant brushstroke feel jarring, but Rothko would allow the odd drip to stay where it was, as if he knew that the only thing more distracting than mistakes is the absence of them.
Rothko paintings are best seen in the ever-changing, ephemeral breath of natural light, which not only alters the emotional quality of colors, but also their hierarchy, which structures what is foreground and background. You can never tell, for certain, which rectangle has been painted first. “Two characteristics exist in my paintings,” noted Rothko. “Either their surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions.” Keeping the eye active while inducing a meditative state, Rothkos have been described as Zen television.
While “sublime” is the term typically ascribed to Rothko’s art—that is, art evoking feelings of terror, awe, infinity, and minuteness—the language of Japanese aesthetics seems even more apt: mono no aware (琲肥儋初), for instance, a bittersweet sense of the ephemeral nature of existence. Or wabi sabi (顜”鍶”), finding beauty in rustic simplicity with a slightly bleak quality suggesting age, deterioration, and the passage of time. Or the notion of yūgen (), a veiled nature seen through an atmosphere of rich and mysterious beauty. For sensitive observers, there is something beneath and beyond the surface simplicity of Rothko’s colored squares, as suggested in a haiku by the Zen monk Issa.
The world of dew
Is the world of dew—
And yet. And yet—
In Rothko’s reduced format, nuance is the catalyst for introspective dialogues between viewer and painting. His forms are so clarified that they transcend static qualities and divisions to become unified essences of color, form, texture, inner and outer, infinity, interconnection, compression, expansion, dense opacity, airy lightness, and so on. As Martin Heidegger observes in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the origin of what something is, as it is, is what we call “essence.” And Rothko, whose abstract paintings were utterly original at the time, was fundamentally concerned with origins and essences—of light, existence, spirit. Transcending dualities and achieving clarity was a guiding ideal for the artist, who wrote: “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and between the idea and the observers. […] To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” Rothko’s search for clarity seems to mirror that of dedicated winemakers who, over the years and decades of honing their craft, seek to deliver wines that are the clearest possible expressions of place, time, and origin.
The dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus
Although Rothko insisted that light was his primary interest and resisted being labeled a “mere colorist” (or an abstractionist, for that matter), it is worth considering the role of color in his paintings. Classic Rothkos often involve every variation of red on the spectrum—from shimmering crimson, to the deepest, darkest burgundy. Along with intense oranges and yellows, Rothko favored red for the complex emotional response and energy these warm tones evoke, as well as their symbolic potential. He claimed always to be surprised to hear his pictures described as peaceful, pointing out that “red is the color of an inferno.” “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene… that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. Behind the color lies the cataclysm.”
The opposing forces with which Rothko grappled were inspired by his reading of Nietzsche’s analysis of Apollo and Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy. Already in this, Nietzsche’s first book, the German philosopher insists that life has to be understood first and foremost as an aesthetic phenomenon, a worldview that resonated deeply with Rothko. Apollo, the sun god, was also god of form, individuation, contemplation, and illusion. Dionysus, by contrast, embodied primal, entangled reality, without individual or individuated parts. As the god of wine, ecstasy, and revelry, Dionysus represents the primal and chaotic aspects of existence. Nietzsche associated Dionysus with emotions, instincts, and the irrational forces of life. The Dionysian element is characterized by spontaneity, passion, and a sense of unity with the universe.
Wine, as a symbol of Dionysus, represents the intoxicating and liberating aspects of life. It symbolizes the dissolution of boundaries, self-transcendence, and a connection to the primal energies of existence. For Nietzsche, to embrace the Dionysian spirit is to be released from the constraints of rationality and to celebrate life’s inherent chaos and beauty. For the philosopher, the Dionysian worldview was more accurate, honest, and truthful; at the heart of existence is chaos. Offering the comforting illusion of form, the Apollonian worldview enables the individual to grasp the (apparent) world and therefore function. Chaos and void still exist but are rendered more bearable. Rothko expressed his gratitude to Nietzsche, writing: “I found in this fable, the poetic reinforcement for what I inevitably knew was my inevitable course: that the poignancy of art in my life lay in its Dionysian content, and that the nobility, the largeness and exultation are hollow pillars, not to be trusted, unless they have their own core, unless they are filled to the bulging, by the wild.”
Like Nietzsche, Rothko embraced the Apollonian spirit, but only insofar as it was counterbalanced by Dionysian flux. The tremendous power of his paintings emerges from this dialectic, pointing to what the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus called the “unity of opposites.” Rothko’s forms seem to stand on their own for a moment, but they soon dissolve, merge, and become unified before drifting apart again. “Everything flows, and the only constant in life is change,” said Heraclitus, the so-called philosopher of fire (a key influence on Nietzsche). Despite the appearance of stillness and solidity, the paintings pulse, throb, and vibrate the longer one looks at, or rather through, them. “A picture lives by expanding and quickening in the eye of the sensitive observer,” noted Rothko, whose ambition was to elevate painting to the level of music and poetry. “For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo moving slow or fast. But it must move.” Another analogy to wine appears here. Wines that keep our interest are those that move, that change in the glass and in the course of a single sip. Great wines dance; like music, the tempo speeds up and slows down, melodies unfold, motifs appear and disappear, bridges connect different components of the song.
The movement one senses in Rothko’s work points to his use of space, perspective, and color. Color is Rothko’s chosen medium due to its primal, elemental, emotional resonance. Having taught art to children for many years, the painter learned much from them and strove to incorporate their innate intelligence in his work. “If you ask a child what art is, and instead of saying colors they say ‘drawing,’ it’s too late,” he said. “They’ve already gotten too academic about it.” Despite the primacy of color, Rothko strongly resisted the suggestion that this was his subject. “The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions. They are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you say you are moved only by the color relationships in my paintings, you miss the point.” Rothko emphasized that the affective, aesthetic, and symbolic potential of his paintings was not a product of color alone but “measure”; that is, the proportion, scale, or dimensions of elements within a piece of art. Measure involves the deliberate arrangement of various components such as lines, shapes, colors, and forms to create a harmonious and balanced composition.
Art as experience
“A painting is not a picture of an experience, it is the experience,” said Rothko. Painting in the postwar, high era of existentialism, Rothko wanted the experience of his paintings to be personal. As Stephen Polcari writes in Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience:
The challenge facing Rothko in the 1950s was to transform his ideas into new pictorial form and into immediate emotional experience. The existentialism and emotionalism in cultural circles of the late 1940s and early 1950s undoubtedly also played a role in Rothko’s new directness of expression… It was part of a major shift toward involvement in the individual life as opposed to the deep concern with cultures and civilizations that had characterized intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, American culture turned from an emphasis on grand historical questions to a more Kierkegaardian concern with the individual’s own struggles for life and preservation of integrity.
This context helps to explain why the only time an art historian would ever give you permission to completely indulge your own interpretive experience of a work of art is in front of a Rothko. Not that the artist himself minded—he loathed art critics and historians, and verbal descriptions of his work in general. The apparent simplicity yet sense of enigma makes it very difficult to describe a Rothko without drifting into poetic or associative terms. After all, there is not much to describe. Take No. 9 from 1958, for instance: three rectangles of black, red, and white. But it’s not just that. For starters, the black is not just black, but it reveals dark blues, purples, and grays the longer one stares at it. The wandering eye is drawn to the convergence of colors, the hazy, porous boundaries, the spaces in-between. One wonders where the painting begins and ends; how deep inside the colors one can go, how far off the unframed canvas the glowing colors actually extend, and whether light is shining on the painting or from it. Such active participation in his works is precisely what Rothko was after.
The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. The spectator must move with the artist’s shapes in and out, under and above, dialogically and horizontally; he must curve around spheres, pass through tunnels, glide down inclines, at times perform an aerial feat of flying from point to point, attracted by some irresistible magnet across space […]. Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.
The emphasis is on individual experience, which will be different for different individuals, or even for the same individuals at different moments or life stages. And yet, Rothko is not interested in art as self-expression, but the expression of something much larger. “You may communicate about yourself; I prefer to communicate a view of the world that is not at all myself. Self-expression is boring. I want to talk about something outside myself—a great scope of experience.” This self-transcending dialogue with the world, however, begins on the nondiscursive, nonrepresentational level. It takes place on the level of the body and senses, beginning with our primary sense: vision. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul—the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.”
Once the eye has carried out its prodigious work and the emotions are stirred, people are known to say the most beautiful things about a Rothko. “It’s what came before God separated light and dark in the opening lines of Genesis.” “It’s being a kid and gently pushing your fingers against your closed eyelids to watch the colors swirl and churn, not knowing what’s coming next.” “It’s so many shades of blue that speak so deeply, it’s like a beauty one can barely stand.” “It’s a green like the peace in your heart on a spring morning.” “It’s the luminescent light behind the horizon before the sun rises.” “It’s the depth of black when your eye adjusts to descending night.” Such poetic descriptions are in part why we can associate Rothko with wine, along with his preference for the color red. And nowhere is the connection more apparent than in the Seagram Murals, which look like they were painted with wine.
The Seagram Murals
Following his Apollonian phase—marked by paintings with a joyous, exuberant quality, with an extensive range of saturated reds, pinks, mauves, and oranges offset against more introspective greens, blues, and maroons—the darkened palette of the late 1950s brought new gravity and pathos to Rothko’s work. As the centerpiece of the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition, the Seagram Murals demonstrated the artist’s growing interest in creating a transcendent, meditative encounter for the viewer through his monumental abstract fields of color.
In June 1958, Rothko accepted a commission for a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant that architect Philip Johnson was designing for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s new skyscraper, the Seagram Building, in the heart of Manhattan. In the tradition of the fresco as practiced by the great Italian masters, he aimed to create a monumental, meditative space that would be inseparable from the architecture. “I have always maintained that if I should be given an enclosed space which I could surround with my work it would be the realization of a dream that I have always held,” said Rothko.
In his new studio, a former gymnasium in the Bowery, the artist installed scaffolding at the same dimensions of the dining room. Some 30 works were produced before he was satisfied. Made up of rectangular shapes with dilated outlines, unlike the typical horizontal format of the color fields, the Murals are mostly vertical. The palette also shifted to darker reds, burgundies, and blacks. The more opaque, solemn, restrained colors diminished the ethereal “floating” aspect of Rothko’s earlier paintings, as well as the sense of light spreading out in all directions. Here the light seems to spring from within the painting, the chromatic layers creating an extended impression of depth, palpitation, vertigo. The subtly modulated fields of shimmering color seem to draw one into them and envelop viewers into a boundless, intimate, contemplative space.
In December 1959, realizing that the site, an emblem of opulent luxury, in no way corresponded to the spirit of the project that he had conceived, Rothko famously ended the contract. “It was clear these two elements [the place and the canvases] were not made for each other,” he wrote in a notebook. Ten years later, he selected nine of the panels and donated them to the Tate Modern in London, pleased with the idea of their close proximity to JMW Turner’s work, which Rothko deeply admired. The paintings arrived in London on the day of his death (by suicide, at the age of 66) and are exhibited in the Rothko Room.
From the multiforms onward, Rothko employed a portal effect, induced by the narrow perimeter of color around the edges of the canvas and the rectangular forms. In the radiant Apollonian phase of the early 1950s, the bright portals seem ecstatic. In the darkening palette of the late 1950s and into the 1960s, and particularly in the Seagram Murals, we see Rothko taking a more Dionysian turn. The forms resemble ancient pagan temples or a Greek colonnade—an entry, by way of a purifying ring of fire, into a sacred space. “I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it,” said Rothko.
Heidegger likens the Greek temple to the work of art in its capacity to make visible what is otherwise invisible. The work of the temple, like the work of art, is to open up a world of beings, to show things in their emergence, to give humans an outlook on themselves.
Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and come to appear as what they are. The Greeks called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things physis. It illuminates also that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth.
As a gathering place where earth, sky, divinities, and mortals meet, the temple is an eye-opener into being. It is no coincidence that Rothko painted such portals—a word derived from the Proto-Indo-European root per, meaning “to lead, pass over, through,” and the Greek poros, meaning “journey, passage, way.” “Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks,” wrote Rothko. As noted above, the artist wanted the adventure to be unique for each individual, and he embraced the fact that every viewer would bring their own experience, identity, mood, and so on to his paintings. In this sense, Rothko’s philosophy of art aligns with that of Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, and others who view the transformative power of art residing in its ability to evoke strong emotions and connect individuals through shared expressions of feeling.
For those of us with wine on the mind, we would be hard pressed not to sense it in the Seagram Murals. Entering a dim octagonal room and being surrounded by these massive, imposing paintings, the immediate atmosphere was that of a dark winery, or a kind of wine mausoleum. The canvases speak of red wines of different ages, stages of maturation, and grape varieties. Dark purples verging on black suggest Madiran or Cahors; the lighter forms, Burgundy or Beaujolais. Subsumed in this vinous milieu, a cascade of associations unfolded, and continued unfolding for days after my visit to the exhibition, like the mysterious lingering impression left by great wine.
Also, as with great wine, the viewer needs time and silence to experience the full effect of Rothko’s works, especially the Seagram Murals. The slow dissolve, a subtle, pulsing wash of color and depth pulls your eye into a deeply gentle, meditative experience. Via the eye, other senses can become awakened. Among the Murals, I seem to hear a murmur, the faint bubbling of fermenting wine, the smell of grapes macerating, the hissing of tanks and barrels, the dank, musty air, the metamorphosis of grapes into wine. I’m transported to wineries I’ve visited around the world, and to the ones I worked in when I was younger in my native Sonoma County. I recall foggy mornings in the vineyards, guiding grapes through the press and into tanks, being up to my elbows in sweet, sticky juice and skins, plunging grape skins down into the juice, filling barrels, and staring into the black hole from which emits the seductive, intoxicating vapor of Dionysus.
The Dionysian danse macabre of fermenting wine appears innocent enough from a distance. At the molecular level, however, a symphony of chaos unfolds. Billions of yeast cells, like voracious beasts, gorge themselves on sugars, drowning in their own creation as oxygen surrenders to carbon dioxide and alcohol. It’s a kamikaze mission, closer to Nietzsche’s will to power or Freud’s death drive than Spinoza’s self-preserving conatus or Schopenhauer’s will to life. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of any organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results” (italics per the original).
As yeast perish, macerating grapes bleed out, releasing torrents of color, tannins, and aroma and flavor compounds. Tannins, once dormant, awaken and intertwine, embrace, forming the intricate structures that later, and to varying degrees, grip the palate. Acids, once sharp and unforgiving, succumb to transformation, their tartness yielding to the alchemy of fermentation. Aromatic compounds are released, glycerol and volatile essences emerge, swirling in a tempest of scents that herald the birth of new flavors and textures. The grapes, seeking only to discharge the strength of the vine, to increase its territory, surrender to the transformative power of fermentation, yielding a sublime nectar born of chaos.
Seen through the portals of the Seagram Murals, one senses the creative destruction that is at the core of wine. “Look again,” said Rothko. “Red is the color of an inferno. It is a cataclysm.” We might also recall that in the cultures of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Christianity, wine was symbolically associated with blood. To drink wine in Dionysian rituals was to ingest the god’s blood, merging it with the blood of mortals. Such currents drift through my mind as I stare into the pulsing portals of the Seagram Murals and reflect on them later in my apartment over a glass of red. Yet the aesthetic analogies between Rothko’s artwork and wine are not limited to this particularly vinous series alone.
Rothko and wine as sensuous portals
Like a Rothko canvas, great wines possess a dynamism that keeps the sensitive observer deeply engaged and open to the experience at hand. As the aromas and flavors dance and change, melodies unfold, motifs appear and vanish, textures and layers morph and reform, we barely notice that we have crossed a Dionysian threshold and entered spaces of feeling, memory, and reflection. For Rothko, clarity was the ultimate goal—to eliminate all obstacles between the artist, the work, and the observer. Winemakers often seek a similar clarity, honing their craft over years and decades to deliver wines that express their origins. If we are prepared to listen, such wines become sensuous portals to the hillside, soil, season, and community from which they emerge. Like the Greek temple or works of art, wines of purity and grace are more than mere objects, but poetic events where earth, sky, divinities, and mortals meet and worlds are brought forth.2 Or at least they can be so. As Terry Theise notes, “Wine can be a bringer of mystical experiences—but not all wine.” The experience depends on the wine but also on what we bring to it, much like Rothko’s glowing canvases. As the artist said, “If people want sacred experiences, they will find them here; if they want profane experiences, they’ll find them too.” Whether we experience wine and art as sacred or profane will depend on what Heidegger called “an openness to the mystery,” or what Rothko described as the willingness to venture into unknown worlds. ▉
Notes
1. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), philosopher, mayor of Bordeaux, and inventor of “the essay,” saw his essais as experiments. The French term simply means “tries,” though as the critic Adam Gopnick suggests, the English word “sketch” comes closer. Montaigne was born Michel Eyquem; the family name and estate survive to this day in Château d’Yquem. The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers another good description of the essay: “Something is tried out in words with no aspiration to the complete or the definitive, in which enlarging one’s experience can take priority over winning an argument, proving a point, or coming to conclusions.”
2. Heidegger draws on the Greek term poiêsis, which he translates as “bringing-forth.” He explained poiêsis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger’s example of a threshold occasion; a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. Grapes made into wine is an example of poiêsis par excellence.
References
James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (University of Chicago Press, Chicago; 2012).
Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås, The Aesthetics of Wine (John Wiley & Sons, London; 2012).
Adam Gopnick, “Montaigne on Trial,” The New Yorker, January 16, 2017.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper Perennial, New York; 2008).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (The Modern Library, New York; 2000).
Adam Phillip, “Up to a Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay,” Salmagundi 178/179 (2013), pp.44–55.
Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 1993).
Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out (Yale University Press, New Haven; 2015).
Mark Rothko, Writings on Art 1934–1969 (Yale University Press, New Haven; 2006).
Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality (Yale University Press, New Haven; 2006).
Terry Theise, Reading between the Wines (University of California Press, Berkeley; 2011).
