Event
Screening of the documentary Rothko. An Abstract Humanist and a meeting with the film director Isy Morgensztern
Screening of the documentary Rothko. An Abstract Humanist and a meeting with the film director Isy Morgensztern (translation into Polish provided)
museum cinema / free admission
About the movie:
« …an exceptional film… »
Sylvie Kerviel
Le Monde Télévision. 29/01/05
“…With its excellent musical score, this subtly directed, fascinating documentary retraces Rothko’s progression.”
Bernard Heltz
Télérama. 19/01/05
Born in Russia in 1903, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 10 and committed suicide in New York in 1970. But just who is Mark Rothko ? Probably one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. He brought into abstract painting a function that had been abandoned by philosophy: to unify our relationship to the world around us.
His path is intimately linked to the painters who gave the United States their first art movement of international stature, the “abstract expressionists”: Pollock, Newman, Kline, Still and Motherwell. But the unique quality of his work and its emotional strength sets Rothko aside from any movement.
This documentary retraces his life and presents his work including the many paintings that came before and after his abstract period, which is referred to as his “classical” period. A major figure in art who, like Turner before him, attempted to paint “…something very close to nothingness”.
Isy Morgensztern
This film has been shown at the following museums:
National Gallery Washington
Hermitage Museum St Petersburg
National Museum Riga
Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme Paris
Museum of Modern Art Tel-Aviv
Texts on the jacket inside the DVD :
“…I have never thought that painting a picture has anything to do with self-expression. It is a communication about the world to someone else. After the world is convinced about this communication, it changes. The world was never the same after Picasso or Miro. Theirs was a view of the world which transformed our vision of things. All teaching about self-expression is erroneous in art; it has to do with therapy.” Mark Rothko
See also
14 May – 25 October 2026 Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in Królikarnia
17 April – 13 September 2026 The National Museum in Warsaw
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