There is a peculiar stillness when one stands before a large canvas by Mark Rothko. Imagine two soft-edged rectangles of color hovering against one another, one perhaps a deep violet, the other a glowing rust, their edges gently blurred, the paint layered in such a way that the fields feel luminous from within. These are not landscapes, not portraits, not narratives. They are surfaces of feeling. Rothko’s color-field paintings allow color itself to become the subject: vast, simple in form, yet layered in depth.
Take his 1956 “Orange and Yellow,” for example, a broad oil-on-canvas that measures 91 inches by 71 inches. A field of orange covers most of the surface, and a glowing yellow rectangle floats near the top, the edges softly haloed as if the paint were dissolving into air. Standing close, one can feel the scale of the work: the paint swells, the color immerses. One becomes aware of the wall, the floor, one’s breathing. The experience is not a comfort, it is an encounter.
Contrast that to a drip painting by Jackson Pollock. Imagine standing before a canvas laid flat on the floor, paint poured, dripped, flung across it. There is no central figure, no horizon line, no weight resting in one corner. Instead, the surface swarms with trajectories of paint: white lines arching like lightning, dark pools where paint gathered, overlapping arcs and loops. Pollock’s technique, which he began using in the late 1940s, allowed him to “record the force and scope of his physical gesture” by letting paint flow, swirl, accumulate according to Francis Valentine O’Connor of Britannica.
In Pollock’s painting “One: Number 31, 1950,” the scale is huge, the paint seemingly spinning outward from an internal point of motion. The eye cannot rest, but wanders the surface, encountering place after place in what feels like a map of movement. One might feel disoriented, or rediscover what it is to let one’s view drift, without the comfort of a known anchor.
Now, consider Agnes Martin’s pale, grid-based canvases. “Untitled #5 (1975)” is composed of a series of faint horizontal bands, pale grey over off-white, over which very fine, hand-drawn vertical pencil lines repeat with small variations. The effect is at once quiet and expansive: you sense the surface, you sense the space, you sense the painter’s steady hand and small deviations, and you begin to feel something like calm attention stirring. Martin herself said, “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.”
What you see isn’t a tree or a face, it isn’t a story with a beginning and an end. It is a field of seeing where you are invited to dwell. The color is restrained, the form minimal, yet the work becomes existing — a sort of presence in stillness. In this way, these paintings quietly assert that beauty can exist not just in spectacle but in the very act of noticing.
Why does modern art of this kind matter? Because it offers a different kind of beauty. This is a beauty less about prettiness, and more about presence and participation. Rothko invites the viewer into a quiet, almost meditative space; Pollock asks the viewer to navigate complexity and energy; Martin offers something like a clearing, a place where the eye can rest and the mind can drift. Her faint grids and pale bands of color do not demand attention so much as they steady it, asking the viewer to notice small shifts, small breaths, the subtle feeling of being with a work rather than interpreting it.
In all three, the purpose of the artwork is not simply to be looked at, but to be inhabited. This does not mean a piece cannot be ugly by conventional standards, or that it must immediately please. Rothko’s darker canvases may feel foreboding, Pollock’s surfaces may feel chaotic, and Martin’s restraint may feel austere or even empty. But beauty need not always soothe. Sometimes it unsettles, sometimes it asks, sometimes it awakens, and in that awakening, even the quietest lines can become luminous.
That said, the system around modern art deserves critique. The fact that some collectors treat works as currency, tax shelters, or status symbols does not invalidate the meaning of the paintings themselves, but it does demand attention. If a painting is acquired not for its capacity to affect the soul, but solely for its financial statement, the art becomes collateral. Our obligation is to preserve the space for the art to speak, not to commodify it fully.
We must also preserve the public access, critical engagement, and honest critique that these works require to function. If modern art is reduced only to its market value, we lose the possibility that it might still reflect something of our experience: the fragment, the unstable, the non-narrative. That part of life that doesn’t fit neat boxes.
In a time of rapid images, of immediate gratification, of algorithms offering the answer before the question is asked, modern art asks us instead to wait, to dwell, and to see. To stand before a vast field of color, or a dripping web of motion, and let something inside us shift: slightly uncertain, slightly changed.
There is room for imperfection in art. There is room for doubt. And in that room, sometimes we find what is most vivid: not the image we expected, but the one that expected us.
