Comparisons may be invidious, but they can also be illuminating. Consider the small, tightly focused exhibition of works by Mark Rothko and the 19th-century American folk artist Ammi Phillips at the American Folk Art Museum.
On the face of it this is a stretch. Phillips, a prolific itinerant portraitist active in New England between 1811 and 1865, was a self-taught neo-Classical realist, a kind of folk-art Ingres. His figures are simplified and flattened, but their faces are so sensitively drawn that they seem like real individuals and not just the generalized types that the subjects of folk portraiture often seem.
Rothko, who emigrated from Russia to the United States as a boy in 1913, was an intellectual omnivore. He attended Yale and studied briefly in New York with the Modernist painter Max Weber. In the 1940s and ’50s, along with artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still, Rothko pushed abstract painting to unprecedented formal extremes. His signature canvases, in which large, fuzzy-edged rectangles of color are arranged in mysterious hovering stacks, would seem to be far from Phillips’s earthbound portraiture.
As organized by the museum’s senior curator, Stacy C. Hollander, the exhibition nonetheless reveals parallel ways of dealing with surface, color and light. Both painters favored broad flat areas of color, and Ms. Hollander has underlined that connection by selecting paintings by both artists that feature red, pink and green. An untitled 1970 composition of bright-red soft-edged rectangles by Rothko echoes the red dresses worn by children in several paintings by Phillips.
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