The Brooklyn Rail

The artist’s friend loans her the keys to an empty apartment in Venice. It’s the middle of summer, 1988. She makes numerous train trips to Padua, visiting Giotto’s chapel, but more often she remains on the island, and when she does she walks to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where Tintoretto’s Crucifixion adorns a wall in the great room designated for gatherings of the fraternity’s governing body. More than four centuries separate the moments when Dorothea Rockburne communes with the painting and the final brushstroke laid down by Tintoretto in 1565. To her, it doesn’t matter if you’re from the culture in which the work was made. “You can dart back and forth through the centuries,” she tells Saul Ostrow when she returns to New York, “time has complete irrelevance.”

The impulse inciting her to action begins as soon as she’s back in New York. In her notebook she records color combinations and associates them with geometric shapes. She writes in pen, swiftly, and strikes nothing out. On August 16 she sets down an equation:

Matisse + Tintoretto + Gesualdo + Constructivism = Glory of Doubt, revisited

Like a good set of instructions, the equation points in the direction of a desired result. “Matisse” becomes a grouping agent for the series, which Rockburne titles “Cut-Ins,” and when an exhibition catalogue is produced, The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto is the lead painting. Along the bottom margin of her notebook page she writes another instruction, “push tradition to the point of paradox.”

The symbol of the cross is steeped in tradition. For Christians, it corresponds to the crux of a primary narrative, the transition of their savior from life to death. Rockburne is disinterested in the biblical account, but she comes back again and again to the cross in the center of Tintoretto’s painting. It pulls the viewer towards it. Tintoretto uses the gravity of the symbol to underscore the faith of his patrons. Rockburne wants only the feeling of force. The cross in the center of her painting will have the dimensions of a plus sign.

She works on the “Cut-Ins” through winter and into spring, but it isn’t until July of ’89 that she makes the preliminary sketch for The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto. After it’s complete, she snaps a few Polaroids of the drawing and pastes two of them in her work diary. Beside the photographs she writes, “small square light is on the outside; large square light is on the inside.” The composition won’t change; the colors will only be tweaked. She continues to regard her efforts in matter-of-fact notation:

Circles with the watercolor brushes are awkward. Must find another way to make LIGHT emanate from centers, but using the geometry in the folds. Today’s painting of the smaller squares for Tintoretto must begin again.

A day later, she finds temporary success using varnish brushes. But by the following week she’s dissatisfied: “Paint squares again. Change method of painting squares; change lower square colors to Perm magenta and red.” At last, she lists her pigments: cadmium orange, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, permanent magenta, cadmium red scarlet, Holbein Permanent Green #1. Upon sheets of acetate, the green and yellow are applied in a concentric, rectilinear pattern; the magenta and red are made to swirl; a wash of cadmium orange covers the museum board. Where the acetate squares overlap, Rockburne adheres gold leaf.

In the fall, John Yau is commissioned to write an essay for the “Cut-Ins.” He acknowledges that “like Matisse, Rockburne believes color can act upon a viewer’s deepest feelings.” In his essay, titled “Light and Dark,” Yau takes special care observing the relationship between color and light in Rockburne’s work as it corresponds with Matisse.

In his work, color and plane become unified, while in hers, vivid light and planar form become interchangeable. Light radiates out from unseen dimensions, and color pushes against color. Lustrous planes become chromatic forms and vice versa.

Rockburne makes the comparison explicit in a lecture she presents at the Museum of Modern Art in mid-November. She is invited by Gerrit Lansing for a program called “Contemporary Art in Context.” The lecture is titled “Matisse: Memory of Oceana / Memory of Egypt” and she presents it in full view of Matisse’s painting. She tells the audience about how she’s just completed a new series called “Cut-Ins” that are “my own dialogue with Matisse.” When Lansing asks Rockburne why Matisse’s work is important to her, the artist responds by paraphrasing Alfred Barr: “Matisse speaks of light and love.” She says, “For me those are the real issues.” Alain Kirili asks Rockburne about Matisse’s chapel. Sean Scully is in attendance.

An advertisement for Rockburne’s exhibition New Work: Cut-Ins appears in the New York Times on the first day of December. The following day, a Saturday, Rockburne’s exhibition opens at André Emmerich Gallery. Many critics respond. Writing for Art in America, Amy Fine Collins singles out The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto. For her, “the yellow diamond appears mystically potent, not only because it effects a sort of alchemical transformation of the elements that overlap it, but also because it circumscribes a kryptonite-green lozenge which glows with hypnotic luminosity.” When the exhibition closes in January, Rockburne’s dealer decides to keep The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto for his own collection, where it remains until a few years after his death in 2007.

Dutifully finding good homes for her artworks, Susanne Emmerich donates The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto to the Parrish Art Museum in 2012 in memory of her late husband. She is motivated by a major retrospective exhibition of Rockburne’s work that originated at the Long Island museum the year before. The same year Rockburne’s painting enters the Parrish collection, the museum relocates from Southampton village to a new facility in Water Mill designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The curator christens the new building with a show that includes The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto.

The painting emerges from the collection once again almost a decade later for an exhibition celebrating women artists who make abstract work. The curatorial conceit is to reconsider a male-dominated history. Two years later it is called upon once more, this time by Sean Scully. After an invitation is sent out to forty-one artists for an exhibition commemorating the museum’s 125th anniversary, Scully selects a work from the collection he’d like to see paired with one of his own. In the statement he gives the museum Scully says, “I chose the work of Dorothea Rockburne because I have known her for such a long time, and this is my opportunity to show my love and respect for her.” He wants to establish a visual correspondence with The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto and the orange speaks to him. He offers a painting whose horizontal bands modulate from red to ocher tones.

In Rockburne’s lecture on Matisse at MoMA she places great emphasis on her belief in art as a dialogue, one that “encompasses ancient art as well as the art of today.” That the exchange is so often based in one artist’s admiration for another ensures the conversation’s everlasting continuity, which is not to give it a timeline. Time is irrelevant. As Rockburne told her friends when she returned from Venice in 1988, “Tintoretto is a radical painter.”

• On view:
  The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto is included in the Parrish Art Museum’s year-long exhibition series, Artists Choose Parrish. This will be the third and last iteration of the exhibition series, and will be open to the public October 29, 2023–February 18, 2024.