Rothko

The recent ‘Weekly Update’ from Tony Ellwood AM (Director of the National Gallery of Victoria) was titled ‘Seeing the world in colour’ and featured Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red) as its signature image.  Rothko’s painting is one of the Victorian public’s ‘top ten’ works in the NGV International Collection and a reminder that art is about both looking and experiencing.

Despite being so well-regarded and so well-liked, it is not an easy work and it is a work which has generated very mixed responses when included in a ‘collection tour’. I confess that it took me a considerable time to have the ‘Rothko experience’ and it was only through sustained and quiet contemplation that I have started to understand the artist’s intention. This encouraged me to explore how artists think about ‘What it is to be an Artist’.

For Mark Rothko (1903-1970), art was a powerful form of communication – not just visually but also emotionally and psychologically. Many critics have described Rothko as the pre-eminent colourist, but this is certainly not how he saw himself. In a conversation with Selden Rodman in 1956 -the same year that he painted Untitled (Red) – Rothko said pointedly: “I am not an abstractionist.. .I am not interested in the relationships of colour or form or anything else.. .I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.. .The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point!”

Rothko wrote a lot about art and his most important written work is the critically acclaimed ‘The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art’ published posthumously by his son, Christopher, in 2004 (more than 30 years after his death). This led to a more comprehensive book ‘Writings on Art’ published in 2006 by Yale University Press, that collected around 90 documents including short essays, lectures, interviews, and letters, written by Rothko over the course of his career. From these we can glean a number of key concepts which he believed were critical for painters.

In one of his earliest essays ‘New Training for Future Artists and Art Lovers’ written in 1934, Rothko emphasised the benefits of approaching art instinctively ‘like a child might’.  Spontaneity plus the avoidance of inhibitions learned through ‘art education’ allows an inner creative impulse and direction to emerge. In watching children create, Rothko observed how children “put forms, figures and views into pictorial arrangements, employing of necessity most of the rules of optical perspective and geometry, but without the knowledge they are employing them”.  This instinctual, rather than pedagogical, approach was pursued by Rothko and freed him up, giving rise to his Colour Field paintings.

Second, Rothko encouraged artists to ‘express the inexpressible’. In moving away from figuration, direct representation and even surrealism he realised ‘with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes’. For Rothko, figuration and narrative art were prescriptive and limiting while abstraction offered the opportunity to remove all allusions to the physical world in his art. Abstraction allowed art to convey what is important to us all – the ‘big picture’ – which is not about the world around us, but about how that world shapes our emotional life. In 1945 he wrote: ‘We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world..[but] .If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self’.

The next element that was important for Rothko was to eliminate barriers between the audience and the canvas. He believed that paintings needed to be direct experiences without ‘obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer’. For Rothko these obstacles included memory, history and geometry (among others). Their elimination was achieved partly through abstraction and not titling his works.  But it was also achieved through the use of large canvases, without framing, hung singly (well away from distracting adjacent art) and in a situation where viewers could situate themselves in close proximity to his canvases (about 18 inches distant from the canvas is perfect) while devoting time to contemplation. In this way the art dominates the viewer’s field of vision (or as Rothko says ‘has the impact of the unequivocal’) and becomes an immersive experience – a vehicle and a portal to an inner emotional world.

The fourth key to Rothko’s art was for the artist to remove his own ego from his art. According to Rothko, a concentration on one’s history, status, and role in society distracts from art’s true power to elicit ‘pure human reactions’. In moving from the individual ‘I’ to the universal ‘we’, art becomes a vehicle for human experience. Rothko’s art was generated by his own emotional responses but these personal reactions were abstracted into a collective experience of emotion. In describing what he meant, he said to the critic Harold Rosenberg: “I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self”.

Rothko was direct, uncompromising and had a lot to say about painting and creativity. In 1943 he co-wrote, with Adolph Gottlieb, a brief ‘Manifesto’ for the New York Times in response to a critical review of their art. Three elements indicate the journey that he was pursuing: art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk; this world is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense; and we favour the simple expression of the complex thought … [and] reassert forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth’.   

Later, in 1959 in an interview with LIFE magazine, he distilled his thoughts when he remarked: “Painting is not about an experience – it is an experience”. To stand in front of Untitled (Red) is to be able to share the experience with a truly great artist.

Rothko’s Untitled (Red) in the NGV collection is the subject of an interesting article by Memory Holloway (Department of Visual Arts, Monash University) in the NGV Art Journal No. 23. Titled ‘Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red): colour and the experience of the sublime’ the essay contextualizes Rothko and his art, and also connects his work with that of Turner’s Val d’Aosta (Falls of Schaffhausen) as a visual experience of transcendence: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/mark-rothkos-untitled-red-colour-and-the-experience-of-the-sublime/

If interested in following up more on Rothko, there is a fascinating lecture by Christopher Rothko (Rothko’s second child) delivered at the St Louis Art Museum, titled ‘Mark Rothko and The Inner World’.  Christopher has a BA in Literature from Yale, a Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Michigan and is also a music critic. He has written extensively about his father as well as editing his father’s book.  The lecture can be viewed on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QpVRH6WUkY

Or if you just want to enjoy Rothko’s art with a gentle piano soundtrack, have a look at ‘Mark Rothko: A collection of 312 works’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifAnstw0GuU