Rothko’s Vast Intimacy
I am not a zen Buddhist. I am not interested in any civilisation except this one. The whole problem of art is how to establish human values in this specific civilisation. (Mark Rothko)
Both at the personal and the political level, Mark Rothko saw art as purposeful, having a mission to do good in the world. He hated the idea that his own work would be prostituted and become mere decoration. When his career had begun to flourish and his paintings sold for high prices he accepted a commission for paintings for the new Seagram building on Park Avenue. But when he realised the meaning of his work decorating the walls of the top executives’ dining room he withdrew from the commission explaining his original intention with some humour and great anger:
I accepted this assignment as a challenge with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in this room.
For the same reason he rejected an offer of the Whitney Museum to buy two of his paintings which would have accelerated his stature in the art world, his reason being that he could not control the manner in which they would be displayed. This was an obsessive concern that never left him and led to his designing the last great building, at the end of his life, in which his works would be displayed, the Rothko Chapel. Here he exercised total control down to the last centimetre.
My pictures are large, colourful and unframed, intimate and intense.. the opposite of decoration.
Some would say that he darkened his palate in later life to reject the perception that his successful and high-price winning work was ‘decorative’. His great rectangular colour paintings, especially convey one of the central ideas of Judaism — tikkun olam or the repairing of the world. For him the role of art was to synthesise, to mend what is damaged, not to further dis-member. This is why people who stand in front of his large canvases — the light or the dark ones — so often feel an unexpected and uncontrollable surge of emotion. It is not uncommon for people to break down sobbing.
Another key Jewish theme in his artistic consciousness is the prophetic. This does not mean predicting the future. Many people spoke of his art as mystical but he preferred ‘prophetic’. He was dismissive of what people called mysticism and saw himself grounding his work in the real and the concrete.
I am not a mystic. A prophet perhaps. But I don’t prophecy woes to come. I just paint the woes already here.
In the same way as his style became increasingly simple in expression but complex in thought, he rejected the association critics made with zen.
I am not a zen Buddhist. I am not interested in any civilisation except this one. The whole problem of art is how to establish human values in this specific civilisation.
Seeing a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art, he similarly rejected the label of ‘action painter’.
His art is deeply serious and yet not solemn. Although he had a mischievous sense of humour and irony it does not get obviously expressed in his work. Artistically he was concerned only with ‘the timeless and the tragic’. He rejected small talk and said that there is ‘no such thing as good painting about nothing’. Art for Rothko was always about moving towards some thing with ever greater clarity.
In his own life-story he saw art as an adventure into the unknown, a realm beyond ordinary common-sense thinking which can only be explored by those willing to take the ultimate risks.
The world of the Imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
Despite his always rebelling about something, Rothko had success, fame, recognition, acclaim and great wealth thrust upon him. Resisting materialistic values that pulled him towards the centre and to conformity to the world’s ways, he struggled to remain on the margins where the artist belongs. He was a poor boy who never got used to the idea that he was rich; perhaps guilty and certainly conflicted by his own success. As in the Chinese story of the rich man carrying his wealth in the form of huge stone pieces round his neck, Rothko struggled. He struggled to relate primarily, not with fame or fortune, but with what he, like any artist, desired: to be understood and to change the world by convincing it of his way of seeing it. Yet
…art is not about self-expression but seeing the world a certain way and convincing the world of what you see and the world is changed.
Self-expression, he believed, often results in inhuman values. Truth must strip itself of that form of the self, which can be so deceptive and produce such a power of illusion and corruption.
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In the last phase of his life he was befriended by John and Dominique de Menil, wealthy art patrons from Houston. They gave him his last commission and allowed him complete freedom in designing the space in which these fourteen huge dark-hued canvases would reside — in what became known eventually as the Rothko Chapel. His obsession with the design and display — although he died before it was completed — reminds one of the detailed description of the design of the Temple of Jerusalem in the Book of Leviticus.
These last great works were the only ones we know he used assistants on, to help with the background colour of the canvases. They are not so much on the walls of the Chapel but they are the walls. The walls too are not in addition to the space. They are the space, a single context. Nowhere more than there does one feel what he says of his large works to be true:
I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters and so that the first experience is to be within the picture.
Strange but true: the larger the painting, the less of the artists’ self is in it and the more completely and intimately must it envelop and include the person looking at it.
Lacking images or figurative means to work with, Rothko’s form is the language of colour. So even without figures, proportion plays a great role in the artist’s work and its effect on the observer.
I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportion of these elements
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This leads me to reflect on the relationship of Rothko’s art to what the mystical tradition calls the ‘art of arts’. In the art of pure prayer, as it is also called, images and ideas are laid aside to allow a formless but all-powerful presence and being present to emerge. The means and becomes a path from one to the other is silence, the absence of thought.
Rothko once listed the essential elements of a work of art. It is helpful to interpret these in relation not only to his painting but to the work of silence practiced in meditation. These are his ‘ingredients’ of art:
· A clear preoccupation with death
· Sensuality — a lustful relation to things that exist
· Tension (whether of conflict or curbed desire)
· Irony (a modern element)
· Wit and play
· The presence of the ephemeral and of chance
· Hope. This occupies 10% to make the tragic concept more bearable
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Though vast, his paintings are intimate. Intimacy is when sources of the the personal merge. The paintings are, like intimacy, distinct but frameless. Their own borders are their frame. Although dark, the multiple layers of paint and the ‘imperfect’ manner of application achieve unforgettable colour experience and luminosity. They are powerfully individual and universal simultaneously. Each painting may be said, not to be a separate person, but to emit a presence.
When you enter a room you often have an intuitive sense if there is or is not someone else in the room with you. As you enter the Rothko Chapel, as when you enter your inner room in meditation, you are touched and surrounded by your own solitude. This may also be a feeling of being held or embraced though not smothered. Solitude is not a vacuum of isolation and separation but a capacity, a potential, even the beginning of experiencing, however unnameably, presence. The paintings all around you are there but they do not threaten or try to please or seduce you. It is unsettling and exciting. For some visitors, it is disturbing and they jump up and rush from the bench they just sat on.
In this presence — of what? just colour? — the ego sense is at least temporarily dethroned and we become aware of our vulnerability and smallness in the cosmos. What restores our sense of value and of being real comes in its own time from another wave of presence, the one that can truly be called the Self.
Like Rothko’s colour-fields this presence does not preach or judge, try to convince or even imply that we change or how we should believe. It is not didactic or dogmatic. Lost in the effect that the paintings have on those who expose themselves to them is Rothko’s own stated intention and understanding of what was happening through his art:
I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that lots of people break down and cry, shows that I communicate these basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
Just as art, for Rothko, is not about self-expression, so meditation is not about self-consciousness. Any true art form, like ‘pure prayer’, which is the art of arts, leads beyond personal intention to an apparently impersonal, transpersonal kind of attention and then to the discovery of a relation which is beyond anything that can be called personal in the common sense sense meaning of the term which is always tainted by the ego.
This is because our very deepest nature has been touched and awakened at source. In that, we discover that we are solitary beings but not alone. Over time, in daily life and in concrete ways, we slowly put together the evidence of the fruits of the work of silence and then we see that we are simply becoming more loving beings. It is as if we are falling in love. It is always easier to love the world when you are in love and, when you feel there is reciprocity in this love, something (separateness) drops away and a new creation comes into view.
Rothko was deeply attuned to his inner world, with his great personal unmet need for self-repair, tikkun olam, but also to the external world of people and powers around him. Struggling with himself and with modern times, he nevertheless worked with the passion of the artist, the passion of the contemplative, to produce objects of wordless beauty and transformative power. Nothing better shows that the work of silence, even though it may not bring us all the consolation we would wish for in this life, nevertheless brings us to beauty. Maybe, as Dostoevsky said, it will ultimately be beauty that saves the world. The artist who believes that his work can make the world a better place is like the meditator who sees that, despite the intensely intimate nature of the experience, it transcends personality and is set free to heal a broken world.
Rothko’s personal story does not have a happy ending. Diagnosed with heart problems, in intense mental pain, smoking and drinking too much, his health declined and he could not change his lifestyle. Two years before he died, he left his family and moved into his studio where the ‘vultures of the art world’ gathered. He was found dead by his own hand one morning. In the days before, he had spent long hours, alone and with his friends, staring at his last work Black on Grey.
The Chapel which is an apex of his life’s work, has captivated me since my first discovery of it in a residential quarter of Houston many years ago. Its heroic vast statements in the nearly-no-colour of his dark canvases then and continue to seem to me to transmit a light beyond the veil.
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Rothko’s Life
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rotkovitch in Russia in 1903. Not long before the horrendous Kishinev pogrom had led to the massacre of thousands of Jews in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ where they had been segregated. The pogrom was led by priests and permitted by the police. A ‘blood slander’ against the Jews that had led to countless pogroms since medieval times accused them of murdering Christian children and using their blood in dark rituals.
Rothko went through several phases in his creative development after he began to paint at the age of 20 and until his death in New York in 1970. One of these is known as the ‘mythic’ phase which had no doubt been fed by his surviving a dark atavistic world driven by mythic symbols and atavistic rage.
His father was a secular Jew, a chemist, but he became increasingly religious as the anti-Semitism escalated. Consequently, alone among his siblings at the age of four, Marcus was sent to Talmudic school. This involved long rote learning and intense immersion in biblical texts. Throughout his life he was nicknamed ‘the rabbi’ and was humorously called the ‘last rabbi of western art.’
Marcus’ father emigrated to the US in 1910 and Marcus followed with his mother and sister soon after Marcus turned ten. These early years of cultural alienation in Russia, intense religious training and displacement to a new land marked his psyche, his beliefs and his artistic development. “I was never able to forgive this transplantation to a land where I never felt entirely at home’, he said. Six months after arriving in the US Marcus’ father died. Not unlike many artists or meditators his early experiences of loss and uprooting created the conditions both for suffering and transcendence which would shape the rest of his life to its end.,
He wrote stories, plays and poetry and aligned himself with socialist thinking and became an outspoken political activist. Later he was to say ‘art is not only a form of action. It is a form of social action.’ He believed in the social struggle of American artists. He won a scholarship to Yale but reacted strongly against the anti-Semitism and segregation there. He left Yale and returned to New York and at the age of twenty discovered his calling to painting — claiming with characteristic mixed humour that it was awakened when he walked in on a live nude drawing class and saw the beautiful model. ‘This is the life for me’, he claimed to have said to himself. Although he wrote a little during his career (Writings on Art and The Artist’s Reality,) he focused the rest of his life entirely and compulsively on painting.
The arts cannot imitate each other. You can never trick the gods in the same way twice. I hope this explains my rapture
In his early years he had many exhibitions but sold little. In 1938 he became an American citizen and changed his name to Mark Rothko. He had unhappy marriages.
His early work consisted of landscapes, watercolours and oils, vaguely figurative. His financial stability and academic position was tied to the Jewish Center School where, nicknamed ‘Rothkie’, he was much loved and taught for nearly twenty years.
From figurative painting he passed to mythical themes, then a surrealist phase and a ‘multiform’ period until after 1946 he became what he is today known as: a colour abstractist. In the early phases his work shows an acute sense of urban claustrophobia and stress. His figures seem preoccupied with the act of looking but uncomfortable with what they see and exuding feelings of being trapped. This yielded to a mythic period, as in The Omen of the Eagle, showing the influence of Jung and Greek mythology. In this period he begins to move to more abstract and colour-dominant work. He was influenced by the idea of Nietzsche that art offers humanity an escape from the tyranny of terror which Rothko felt acutely during the collapse of European civilisation in the 1940’s. 1943 is often cited as a turning-point year in which alienated American artists shifted to the Abstract style.
His friend Robert Motherwell said of him later that ‘his thin fields of colour, literally his emblems, his shields, (were) his magic formulae against the terrors of the world.’
Although he was changing, exploring and starting again as all artists do in their development he did not see himself as an innovator but rather as part of a tradition. He could look back and feel connected to golden ages of art, as in the Greece of Pericles, the Italian Renaissance or the age of the French Cathedrals.
A Lecture given at a Seminar on Sacred Silence in Literature and the Arts Conference, Sydney, Australia, 4th October 2019 by Laurence FreemanThe information and some insights in the talk come from several sources. I hope they help the reader, as me, to a clearer sense and meaning of Rothko’s work.
See also:
· Short video of ‘Black on Grey’ (youTube)
· Writings on Art by Mark Rothko (Author),Miguel Lopez-Remiro (Editor), Yale 2006.
· Rothko: Every Picture Tells a Story, Suzanne Pagé, Christopher Rothko, et al, Fondation Louis Vuitton/Citadelles & Mazenod.
