Gregorio Botta's 'Pollock e Rothko' Explores Parallel Divergences

Gregorio Botta's book 'Pollock e Rothko. Il gesto e il respiro' (Einaudi, 2020) examines the lives and practices of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, two central figures of the New York School. Botta frames their relationship as 'divergenze parallele' (parallel divergences), highlighting their shared context—friends, critics, group shows, alcohol, tragic deaths—and their opposing approaches to painting. Pollock's dripping embodies explosive energy, shamanic gesture, and timbric color, while Rothko's color fields emphasize silence, contemplation, and tonal color modulated by light. Botta traces the origins of their tonal/timbric split to a visit to the Convent of San Marco in Florence, where Fra Angelico's frescoes prefigure both tonal painting (in the 'Annunciation') and proto-dripping (in the 'Madonna delle Ombre'). Rothko visited San Marco and found a master in Angelico; Pollock never did. The book details Rothko's evolution toward abstraction in the early 1940s, eliminating figuration until only veils of light remain, and Pollock's invention of dripping in winter 1947, a process Pollock insisted was not chaotic ('No chaos, damn it').