Professor Butter Beard and Mark Rothko’s “Brown and Blacks in Reds”
“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
“What do you see?” Every spring, when I stretch and strive to introduce “Modern Art” to groups of college freshmen and sophomores, I must ask dozens of times, “What do you see?” They glaze. They giggle. Some attempt to impress me with tangled poignant (yet endearing) observations. Most respond with one word: doodles, squares, splatters, light (“A” for you!). Others just stare.
We dance alongside Manet, Renoir and Cezanne. Picasso. Then Vincent, Franz Marc, Duchamp and Meret Oppenheim (that’s always a delightful surprise!). Then I close “Modern” by projecting one huge image of pulsating color: “Brown and Blacks in Red” by Mark Rothko. And I up the ante with “What do you feel?”
Now the conversation gets interesting. Students talk over each other, bouncing with reactions including anger or sadness, warm or dizzy, hypnotized or bored. And then, inevitably, one student will always spin the exercise and say, “How about you Professor? What do you feel?”
Last week I heard myself answer, “Chocolate, my friend. I feel chocolate.”
The “Art Newspaper” reported this week that “Brown and Blacks in Red” is the leading lot for a standalone Sotheby’s auction this spring dedicated to work from the collection of the late New York dealer Robert Mnuchin. Standing nearly eight feet tall, “Brown” is one of a handful of paintings Rothko executed in 1957, most of which are now in major institutional collections. Part of the Mnuchin collection for more than 20 years, it now has an estimated value of $70 to $100 million.
Born to a Jewish family in 1903 in Daugavpils, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz emigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island in late 1913. After originally settling in Portland, Oregon with his family, he moved to New York City in 1923 and enrolled in the Parsons School for Design. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist.
Rothko's work has been described in eras. During his early period (1924–1939), he produced representational art inflected by impressionism, usually depicting urban scenes such as the New York Subway in 1938. This period extended into his transitional years (1940–1950), with continuing incorporation of mythical and “biomorphic” abstraction and “multiforms” - canvases dominated with large regions of color. Rothko's transitional decade was heavily influenced by the horrors of World War II, which prompted him to seek, in his own words, “a novel expression of tragedy in art.”
During Rothko's mature or "classic" period (1951–1970), he consistently painted rectangular regions of color, intended as “dramas” to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. For him, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or the human figure, possessed their own life force.
To achieve this effect, Rothko applied a thin layer of a binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas and painted significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. One of his objectives was to make the various layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing the colors, so that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones.
Modern historians agree that Mark Rothko sought many aims in painting: clarity, contemplation, a purity and honesty in the picture’s ability to convey human emotion. According to the Sotheby’s catalogue note, “The canvases that poured forth in his “Classic Years” were epic, beautiful, literally and figuratively monumental, but were—above all else—conduits for accessing the fullest range of feeling. In ‘Brown and Blacks in Reds,’ the singular masterpiece at the heart of Robert Mnuchin’s collection, we see his aims realized, simultaneously and operatically announcing what it is to paint, to perceive, to live, and to feel.”
“For me,” art historian and curator Katherine Kuh wrote, “Rothko’s work possesses a kind of ecstasy of color which induces different but always intense moods. I am not a spectator—I am a participant.”
Chocolate. I participate through feeling chocolate. An intensely dark chocolate, enhanced with chili pepper and coffee. A brownie-like cookie with the surprising chew of toasted almonds and the lingering taste of a sumptuous sip of Sambuca after a torrential thunderstorm that miraculously morphs into a color-blazing Spring sunset. Professor Butter Beard’s “Signature Cookie.”
“A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.” - Mark Rothko
Professor Butter Beard’s Signature Chocolate Sambuca Cookies
6 dozen cookies
24 ounces dark chocolate
4 ounces (one stick) unsalted butter
¼ tsp chili powder
2 cups almond slices, toasted with ½ tsp fine sea salt
6 large eggs, room temperature
2 cups granulated sugar
2/3 cup Sambuca
1 tsp vanilla paste
1 Tbsp instant espresso powder, dissolved in 2 tsp hot water
1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp fine sea salt
Kosher salt to finish the cookies
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line your baking trays with parchment paper.
2) Melt the butter, chili powder and chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of lightly simmering water. When smooth, set aside to cool slightly.
3) Toast the almond slices with a dash of sea salt. Set aside to cool and then pulse in a food processor to the consistency of coarse sand.
4) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt.
5) In a standing mixer with the whisk attachment, whisk together the eggs and sugar to the ribbon stage. Switch to the paddle attachment and stir in the chocolate. Stir in the Sambuca, hydrated espresso powder and vanilla paste. Finally, stir in the ground almonds. Remove the bowl from the mixer and, with a spatula, fold in the dry mixture until no white streaks remain. Let the batter sit for 15-20 minutes to thicken.
6) Use a 1-Tbsp cookie scoop and portion twelve cookies on a tray. Bake, one tray at a time, for 5 minutes, rotate the pan, and bake for 5 more minutes. Immediately upon removing the cookies from the oven, lightly sprinkle the tops with Kosher salt. Let the cookies cool on the pan 5 minutes before removing them to cool completely on a wire rack.
Note – these cookies make excellent ice cream sandwiches – using your best vanilla ice cream!
