MICHAEL ROTHENSTEIN RA HRE (1908-1993)
MODERN BRITISH (20th Century )

00663c055

Wood and paint boxed

52.00 cm wide   28.00 cm high   6.00 cm deep

20.47 inches wide  11.02 inches high  2.36 inches deep

The Artist

Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein's Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, page 99, illustrated page 100, catalogue number 55

The Sun Boxes, and the beautifully simple nocturne, Moon Box, can be most clearly related to two prints made several years before, Scarlet Bar and Veiled Sun (both dating from 1967), in which the essential composing device is the same: the sun seen as through a window. In the prints, there is a simple schematic arrangement. The sun figure, a linocut circle, is perceived as outside, the woodcut surround suggesting an interior frame: it is a common and conventional pictorial ploy. The Sun Boxes, however, depart from this convention in a way that gives them an enigmatic strangeness.

In Sun Box I, the wooden frame which provides the central image was a found object, a wooden board out of which had been cut a square aperture (it can be said, of course, that when Rothenstein himself cut out the window of the second box he was acting on the basis of a found concept; the two works are perfectly consistent in that respect of an accident provoking an image). Holding the object up to the light, a natural action, prompted the obvious reaction: he had found a window. In constructing and painting the boxes, Rothenstein played an odd and disconcerting trick with the conventional representation of inside/outside, the view through a window from an interior. For the horizon line above which the sun hovers continues across the window frame, and with an even more disconcerting effect, onto the external frame of the box itself. This has something in common with that play with illusion in certain paintings of Margritte, in which a landscape canvas on an easel is continuous with the “actual” landscape it depicts.

Margritte’s paintings function as conceptual propositions, conundrums at play with the logic of visual perception and knowledge. The effect achieved by the Sun Boxes is quite different, however, for the box has an objective presence in the world, independent of the image it contains, which is sealed and separated from the world. The continuity of image breaks that spell of separation twice, bringing the landscape “outside” the window into the implied interior, and the image inside the box on to the outside of the object. Our response must contain the contradiction between our reading of the image and our apprehension of the object, a box, visibly constructed of wood, existing in our space. The image of the sun, the perfect circle, with all its connotations, is inscribed, we see, upon the object as such. As with an early icon, or a primitive altarpiece, the support is an expressive element in the work, and the sophisticated pictorial conventions implied by windows within an image, and frames around it, are subordinated to affective presence. The box, like a decorated retable, and the carved rectangles within, are in this respect hieratic components of a spiritually charged total image. Colour, line, shape and form are equal elements in a complex symbolic presentation that privileges the central motif, the solar heart of light.’(1)


1. Mel Gooding, Michael Rothensein’s Boxes, Art Books International, London 1992, page 30

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