Painter, born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His immigrant parents settled in Portland, OR in 1913. After two years at Yale he settled in New York City, and except for a brief time studying with Max Weber (1925), he became a self-taught painter. During the 1930s he moved through various styles, starting with traditional representational subjects, then mythological themes, and in 19357 was employed by the Federal Arts Project. In the early 1940s he took an interest in Surrealism, but by 1947 his works became increasingly more abstract and by 1950 he found his true style in so-called colour-field paintings, works with large rectangles of colour that express moods, as in Four Darks in Red (1958). In 1961 he had a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, an honour reserved for the giants of art. In 1970 he had two more major exhibits, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he committed suicide that year, shortly after he had completed what some regard as his masterwork, a group of murals for an interdenominational chapel in Houston, TX. In 1988, the manuscript for The Artist's Reality was discovered, leading to its eventual publication in 2004.
For the band, see Rothko (band).Mark Rothko born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was a Latvian-born American painter who is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being an abstract painter.
Childhood
Mark Rothko was born in Daugavpils, Latvia (Vitebsk guberniya, then part of the Russian Empire).
The Rothkoviches were highly educated, despite Jacob’s modest income, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at age five, where Rothko studied the Talmud. This had the adverse effect of stigmatizing Rothko as an outsider within his own family, as his elders were educated in the public school system.
Emigration to the US
Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army, Jacob decided to emigrate to the United States, following the path of many other Jews who left Dvinsk in the wake of the Cossack purges, including two of his brothers who managed to establish themselves as clothing manufacturers in Portland, Oregon, not an uncommon profession among Eastern European immigrants.
Marcus started school in America in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade, completing the remaining four grades in three years, then graduating to the secondary level which he completed, with honors, at Lincoln High School in Portland, in June of 1921 at the age of seventeen. Typical among Jewish liberals, Rothko supported the Russian Revolution yet his political conviction may be described as decorative in the sense that he was never politically engaged.
Following graduation, he received a scholarship to Yale based on academic performance, but, after a year, this scholarship ran out and he was forced to take menial jobs to support his studies.
Artistic Apprenticeship
Marcus moved to New York in the fall of 1923, found employment in the garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He was twenty years old and had taken some art classes in high school but his initial experience was far from an immediate calling. Even his self-described "beginning" at the Arts Student League is not exactly true, for, two months after he returned to Portland to visit his family, he joined a theater group run by Clark Gable’s wife, Josephine Dillon.
Returning to New York, Rothko enrolled in the New School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky, probably his first encounter with a member of the avant-garde. That fall, he took courses at the Art Students League taught by still-life artist Max Weber, another Russian Jew. It was from Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious _expression and Rothko’s earliest paintings portray a Weberian influence.
Rothko's circle
New York provided a fertile atmosphere for the experience of art from all cultures and periods. Among those early influences were the works of the German Expressionists, the surrealist work of Paul Klee and the paintings of Georges Rouault. In 1928, Rothko had his own showing with a group of young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery. Despite some growing success, Rothko still needed to supplement his income, and in 1929, he began giving classes in painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy where he remained as teacher until 1952. Avery’s stylized natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko, whose own paintings soon after meeting Avery, began to address similar subject matter and color, as in Rothko’s 1933/34 Bathers, or Beach Scene.
Rothko, Newman, Gottleib, Sloman, Graham and their mentor Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their days painting and their evenings discussing art. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer. The following summer, Rothko’s first one-man show was held at the Portland Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles, as well as the works of Rothko’s pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy. His family was unable to understand his decision to be an artist, especially at a time when the Depression was at its all time worst.
First one-man show
Returning to New York, unhampered by his lack of family support, Rothko had his first large one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, showing 15 oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. Rothko was already heading in the direction of his renowned later works. Yet, despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. Begun in 1937, and including Gottleib and Sloman, their plan was to create a municipal art gallery to show self-organized group exhibitions. It was also during this period that Rothko found employment, as did many other artists, with the Works Progress Administration, a labor relief agency created under Roosevelt’s New Deal in response to the economic crisis. As the Depression waned, Rothko continued on in government service, working for TRAP, an agency that employed artists, architects and laborers in the restoration and renovation of public buildings.
Development of style
In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about the similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters. The work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art," according to Rothko, "transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." The modernist artist, like the child and the primitive whom he is influenced by, expresses an innate feeling for form that is, in the best and most universal work, expressed without mental interference; Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes and his subject matter and form was, by this time, decidedly non-intellectual, of formal concern, though the composition betrays a deep intellect. Rothko seemed to have reached an illumination concerning the progression of his later works; however it is to the next period we must turn our attention, before proceeding to the mature, rectangular fields of color and light that either culminated or self-destructed in the Rothko Chapel.
This period, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period and the late, transcendent fields of color, is one of transition, incorporating elements from both his early and late periods.
Artistic Maturity
Rothko separated from his wife, Edith Sachar, in the summer of 1937, following Edith’s increased success in the jewelry business. Rothko was, by comparison, a financial failure. On the 21st of February, Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke sudden deportation of American Jews. A similar rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States only increased these fears and in January of 1940, Marcus Rothkovich changed his name to Mark Rothko, as the name "Roth," a common abbreviation, had become, as a result of its commonality, identifiably Jewish. Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Nazi invasion of Finland, Rothko, along with Avery, Gottleib, and others, left the American Artists’ Congress in protest of the Congress’ association with radical communism.
Inspiration from mythology
Fearing modern American painting had reached a dead-end, Rothko was intent on exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes, subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space and color. In his important essay, "The Romantics were Prompted," published in 1949, Rothko observed that the "archaic artist [ . For Rothko, "without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama [ . This "human figure alone in a moment of utter immobility" served as a prototype for the paintings of Rothko's final, signature style, those marvelous fields of radiating color, alone and yet wholly of that other, transcendent image toward which the mythological refers.
Rothko’s use of mythology as a commentary on current history was by no means novel; Rothko, Gottleib and Newman read and discussed the works of Freud and Jung, in particular their respective theories concerning dreams and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and understood mythological symbols as images that refer to themselves, operating in a space of human consciousness that transcends specific history and culture. Rothko later said his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth."
Influence of Nietzsche
Yet the most crucial book for Rothko in this period would be Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. This loss of myth results in the loss of art, as "every culture that has lost a myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity."
Rothko’s new vision would therefore attempt to address modern man’s spiritual and creative mythological requirements and would, as Nietzsche claimed Greek tragedy had, seek to redeem man from the terrors of a mortal life. From this point on, his art would bear as its ultimate aim the burden of relieving modern man’s fundamental spiritual emptiness, an emptiness created in part by the lack of a mythology to properly address, as Nietzsche wrote, "the growth of a child’s mind and [ . Rothko considered himself a "mythmaker," and proclaimed that the only valid subject matter is that which is tragic. "The exhilarated tragic experience," he wrote, "is for me the only source of art."
His vision of myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual decay or void was set in motion decades before by Jung, Eliot, Joyce and Mann, among others, but unlike his predecessors, Rothko would, in his late period, develop his philosophy of the tragic ideal into the realm of pure abstraction, thereby questioning the very foundation of man’s ability to transform his cradle of imagery into a new set of images, no longer dependent on tribal, archaic and religious mythologies, the very symbols Rothko utilized, not without frustration, during this middle period.
These paintings contrast barbaric scenes of violence with those of civilized passivity, with imagery drawn primarily from Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. Soon after the war, Rothko felt his titles were limiting the larger, transcendent aims of his paintings, and so removed them altogether.
The new paintings were unveiled at a 1942 show at Macy’s department store in New York. In response to a negative review by the New York Times, Rothko and Gottleib issued a manifesto (written mainly by Rothko) which stated, in response to the Times critic’s self-professed "befuddlement" over the new work,
It is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that [Gottleib’s] Rape of Persephone is a poetic _expression of the essence of myth;
It is easy to explain The Syrian Bull as a new interpretation of an archaic image, resolving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full a validity today as the archaic symbol had then.
At the root of Rothko and Gottleib’s presentation of archaic forms and symbols as subject matter illuminating modern existence, is the influence of Surrealism, Cubism and abstract art. In 1936,
Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, which were of tremendous influence on his subsequent work: "Cubism and Abstract Art," and "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism." In
response, Rothko painted a number of urban scenes incorporating the stylistic aspects of the Europeans, in particular his celebrated 1938 Subway Scene. Rothko and his peers, Gottleib and
Newman, met and discussed art and ideas with these European pioneers (Mondrian, in particular) and began to regard themselves as heirs to the European avant-garde. perhaps ironically, Rothko
himself described the process as being one toward "clarity." In the Museum of Modern Art, he became fascinated by Matisse’s Red Room, later attributing to it the source of inspiration for his
later abstract paintings.
Break with surrealism
On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Edith separated. Rothko suffered a long depression following their divorce. Thinking a change of scenery might help, Rothko returned to Portland and later traveled to Berkeley, where he met artist Clyfford Still, with whom he began a close friendship. Still’s deeply abstract paintings would be of considerable influence on Rothko’s later works. In the fall, Rothko returned to New York where he met the collector Peggy Guggenheim and her assistant, Howard Putzel, who convinced Guggenheim to show Rothko in her Art of the Century gallery. In 1944, photographer Aaron Siskind introduced Rothko to Mary Alice Beistle, a 23-year old illustrator of children’s books, and the two fell in love and were married in the spring of 1945. Sensing that his art was becoming passé and no longer a viable medium for the direction he was moving (stimulated by Still’s abstract landscapes of color), Rothko broke with the Surrealists, explaining:
I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it. I quarrel with surrealists and abstract art only as one quarrels with his father and mother; I, being both they, and an integral completely independent of them.
Rothko could no longer bring himself to continue interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms. in it, Rothko found release from the Surrealist program of the humanist impulse to mere "memory and hallucination." Despite the abandonment of his project as a "Mythomorphic Abstractionist" (as described by Art News), Rothko became primarily identified with his Surrealist works for the remainder of the 1940’s. The Whitney Museum included them in their annual exhibit of Contemporary Art from 1943 to 1950. The "Abstract Expressionist" movement Rothko and his peers (including Gottleib and Newman) were later associated with, was a loose consortium of mostly secular, urban Jews.
Multiforms
1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s new "multiform" paintings. In viewing the catalogue raisonne, one finds a gradual metamorphosis from surrealistic, myth-influenced paintings of the early part of the decade to those highly abstract, Clyfford Still-influenced forms of pure color. The term "multiform" is applied by art critics; it was never utilized by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings, which, as with his paintings of the latter part of the previous decade, are best viewed as a period of transition from that of surrealism to abstraction. Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure, as self-contained units of human _expression. For Rothko, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. The "multiforms" brought Rothko to a realization of his mature, signature style, the only style Rothko did not fully abandon, perhaps only because he died before he had the chance.
Earlier that year Rothko spent some time in California following a brief resurgence of interest among Californians in his Surrealist paintings. He found work teaching at the California School of Fine Art and while there encountered the work of Clyfford Still. Rothko, in the middle of a crucial period of transition, was impressed by Still’s abstract fields of color, influenced in part by the landscapes of Still’s native North Dakota. In 1947, during a subsequent semester teaching at the School of Fine Art, Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum; Though it would fold the same year, the school was the center of a flurry of activity in contemporary art. In addition to his experience teaching, Rothko began contributing articles to two new art publications, Tiger’s Eye and Possibilities. Using the forum as an opportunity to assess the current art scene, Rothko also discussed in detail his own artwork and philosophy of art . These articles reveal an artist in transition, seeking to eliminate figurative elements from his work.
His 1945 masterpiece Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea magnificently illustrates Rothko’s newfound propensity towards abstraction.
Signature Period
It was not long before the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island, only inviting a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948 and it was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the striking symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary colors. Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvas with vertical formats. In retaliation, Rothko stated:
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Again, Rothko’s aims, in some critics’ and viewers’ estimation, exceeds his methods. In later years, Rothko would do much to promote this spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Rothko Chapel. Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade before the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; The general method for these paintings was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with color pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas, and paint significantly thinned oils directly onto this overlay, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. With a total lack of figurative representation, what drama there is to be found in a late Rothko is in the contrast of colors, radiating, as it were, against one another. European travelsRothko and Mell visited Europe for five months in early 1950. Despite his viewing of many paintings, it was the architecture and the music of Europe that left a deep impression on Rothko. He much admired European art, and he visited the major museums of Paris, yet it was the frescoes of Fra Angelico in the monastery of San Marco at Florence that most impressed him. Certainly the spirituality and concentration on light appealed to Rothko’s sensibilities, as did Angelico’s economic circumstances, which Rothko saw as similar to his own, having always been forced to struggle to exist as an artist. Of Angelico, Rothko stated "As an artist you have to be a thief and steal a place for yourself on the rich man’s wall." Rockefeller III and the purchase of "Number 10" (1950) for the Museum of Modern Art. The 1952 "Fifteen Americans" show curated by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art formally heralded the abstract artists, including works by Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes, it also created a dispute between Rothko and Barnett Newman, after Newman accused Rothko of having attempted to exclude him from the show. When Fortune magazine named a Rothko painting as a good investment, Newman and Still out of jealousy branded him a sell-out, of secretly possessing bourgeois aspiration. Still wrote Rothko to request the paintings he had given Rothko over the years; Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends’ jealousy. While in Rome, Mell discovered that she was pregnant and on December 30, she gave birth to a daughter, Kathy Lynn, whom the parents called "Kate" in honor of Rothko’s mother. In 1954, he exhibited in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met art dealer Sidney Janis, who also represented Pollock and Franz Kline, and the relationship proved mutually beneficial. Despite fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion, a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion, that the true purpose of his work was not being grasped by collectors, audiences or critics. He wanted his paintings to move beyond not only classical art, but abstraction as well. For Rothko, the paintings are objects that possessed their own form and potential and therefore, must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those that might inquire after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is "so accurate." He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. |
For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." In a sense, the "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on your interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings. It was Rothko’s comment on those breaking down in tears before his paintings that may have convinced the De Menils to construct the Houston Chapel.
In 1958, Rothko was awarded the first of two major commissions that proved both rewarding and frustrating. Rothko agreed to provide wall paintings for the building’s restaurant, The Four Seasons; Over the following three months, Rothko completed forty paintings, three full series in dark red and brown, altering his horizontal format to the vertical to complement the restaurant’s vertical features: columns, walls, doors and windows.
The following June, Rothko and his family traveled to Europe and while on the SS Independence he disclosed to John Fischer, publisher of Harper's, his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.
While in Europe, the Rothkos traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice and Pompeii. Following the trip to Italy, the Rothkos voyaged to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, before returning to the United States. Once back in New York, Rothko and Mell visited the Four Seasons and, upset by the restaurant’s pretentious atmosphere, Rothko abandoned the project on the spot, deciding to return his advance to Seagram and Bros. (The final series was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London’s Tate Gallery, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.)
United States
Rothko’s first completed space was created in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., following the purchase of four paintings by collector Duncan Phillips. It was at this time that Rothko first met John and Dominique de Menil, when the couple had journeyed from Houston to New York to meet him. In January of 1961, Rothko sat next to Joseph Kennedy at Jack Kennedy’s inaugural ball. Later that year, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, to considerable commercial and critical success. In spite of this newfound notoriety, the art world had turned its attention from the now passé abstract expressionists to the Next Big Thing, Pop Art, particularly the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist.
Pop Art questioned the previous generation of artists' claim of "spiritual" motives, all the while demanding generous amounts of worldly money for their artwork. One of the accomplishments of Pop Art was the realization that Abstract Expressionism represented the last major movement of modernism and that modernism, for all its declarations of a spiritual and cultural wasteland of modern life, was essentially a negative romanticism in that it criticized the depravity and hopelessness of modern life from an idealistic, nineteenth century perspective of civilization as promise of utopia; Rothko labeled them "charlatans and young opportunists" and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of Pop Art, "are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns' flags, Rothko said, "we worked for years to get rid of all that." It was not that Rothko could not accept being replaced, so much as an inability to accept what was replacing him. He found it valueless, though it received much admiration as collectors sold off their Rothkos, Newmans and Gottliebs and replaced them with Rauschenbergs, and staged retrospectives of artists then in their mid-twenties. For an artist like Rothko who struggled for so long, it was salt in the wound to see such generous attention lavished on those whom he felt had not paid their dues. They replaced the tragedy of the human dilemma with the tragedy of art as commodity. For this project, a wall of paintings for the penthouse of Harvard’s Holyoke Center, Rothko completed twenty-two sketches, from which five murals were completed, a triptych and two wall paintings. Yet Harvard President Nathan Pusey, following an explanation of the religious symbology of the Triptych, had the paintings hung in January of 1963, and later shown at the Guggenheim. During installation, Rothko found the paintings to be compromised by the room’s lighting and, despite the installation of fiberglass shades, the paintings were removed and, weakened by sunlight, stored in a dark room.
On August 31, 1963, Rothko and Mell gave birth to a second child, Christopher Hall. That autumn, Rothko signed with the Marlborough Gallery for sales of his work outside the United States. Stateside, Rothko continued to sell the artwork directly from his studio. Bernard Reis, Rothko’s financial advisor, was also, unbeknownst to the artist, the Gallery’s accountant and, together with his co-workers would later be responsible for one of art history’s largest scandals.
The Chapel
The Rothko Chapel resides near St. Thomas University in Houston, Texas. Immigrants from Paris to New York, for over forty years the De Menils collected some 10,000 objects, including primitive and tribal African Art, Surrealist pieces from modern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the work of a number of contemporary American artists, in particular that of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, whose self-described "religious" and "meditative" paintings provided the inspiration for the De Menil’s ecumenical chapel.
In 1964, Rothko moved into his last studio at 157 East 69th Street, equipping the studio with pulleys carrying large walls of canvas material to regulate light entering in from a central cupola, necessary to re-create the lighting he had planned for the Rothko Chapel. Despite warnings from friends about the difference in light between New York and Texas, Rothko persisted with his studio experiment, setting to work on the canvases that would make up his final artistic statement to the world when they were finally unveiled at the Chapel’s opening in 1971. Rothko told friends he felt the Chapel to be his single most important artistic statement. Architect Philip Johnson, unable to compromise with Rothko’s vision, left the project in 1967 and was replaced with Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry, Houston locals, honored for the opportunity to work with Rothko and willing to make the necessary compromises. The architects frequently flew to New York to meet with the artist; For Rothko, the Chapel was to be a destination, a place of pilgrimage far from the center of art (in this case, New York) where seekers of Rothko’s "religious" artwork, could journey. Initially, the Chapel, now non-denominational, was to be specifically Roman Catholic, and the three years Rothko worked on the project (1964-67) he believed it would remain as such. Thus Rothko’s design of the building and the religious implications of the paintings were inspired by Roman Catholic art and architecture: its octagonal shape based on the Byzantine church of St. Maria Assunta, its triptychs based on any number of triptychs representing the Crucifixion. Perhaps Rothko’s willingness, indeed his excitement, regarding the project, was emblematic of the sense of persecution Rothko felt he was receiving from the art world in the years up to and including those spent at work on the Chapel. It is difficult to know exactly the personal demons the artist was purging with the Chapel, or if he was purging demons at all. What is clear is that the Chapel paintings are the zenith of the "darkness and impenetrability" that, during the latter half of the 1950’s and the early part of the 1960’s, viewers increasingly encountered in Rothko’s work.
Rothko’s procedure of "breathing paint on canvas" required considerable physical stamina that the ailing artist was no longer able to muster. To create the paintings he envisioned, Rothko was forced to hire two assistants to apply the chestnut-brown paint in quick strokes of several layers: "brick reds, deep reds, black mauves." On half of the works, Rothko applied none of the paint himself, and was for the most part content to supervise the slow, arduous process.
The Chapel is the culmination of six years of Rothko’s life and, for some viewers, it as well culminates a career in art that charted a gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, to witness these paintings is to submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, through its transcendence of subject matter into the realm of pure color the paintings remove the merely historical, symbolic, local and metaphoric trappings of specific denominational artistic expressions of the spirit allowing for an experience approximating that of consciousness itself. For others, the Chapel houses 14 large paintings (three triptychs and five individual works) whose dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces are the very definition of hermeticism and self-absorption. Stated differently, how can this art possibly presume to provide the same religious experience for modern man that, say Chartres Cathedral or Titian’s "Adam and Eve", provides for the Christian? Which gives rise to the question: what were the circumstances that led to the construction of this peculiar monument to an artist whose work provokes such varying responses?
The Chapel’s final appearance was the result of many fits and starts between artist, architect and commissioners. For some, the baffle compromised the original vision of the artist by creating interference in the room’s simplicity of design, casting shadows on the paintings where there was once light, making for an atmosphere substantially different from that intended by the artist.
The layout of the paintings is as follows: a monochrome triptych in soft brown on the central wall (5 x 15 ft. Despite its basis in religious symbolism (the triptych) incorporating less-than-subtle imagery (the crucifixion), the paintings are very difficult to attach specifically to traditional, mythological Christian symbolism and therefore act on the viewers somewhat subliminally (though no less directly than figurative religious art).
Rothko never saw the completed Chapel and never installed the paintings.
She continued, commenting wryly on the reigning Pop Artists: "We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine", noting Rothko’s courage in painting these impenetrable fortresses of color. Art historian Barbara Rose favorably compared the Chapel to the Sistine Chapel and the Matisse Chapel, noting that "the paintings seem to glow mysteriously from within". Chase, the paintings, as with all of Rothko’s later work, are involved in simultaneously "inscribing and erasing received pictorial language, working with a structure of traces, constructing a play between presence and absence". The drama for many critics of Rothko’s work is the uneasy position of the paintings between, as Chase notes, "nothingness or vapidity" and "dignified ‘mute icons’ offering ‘the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today’." Several books have been commissioned by the De Menils to promote the religious aspect of the Rothko Chapel, including Susan J. Barnes’ The Rothko Chapel and Sheldon Nodelman’s The Rothko Chapel Paintings and has inspired music and poetry by Morton Feldman and John Taggart, respectively.
Suicide
In the spring of 1968, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, a result of his chronic high blood pressure. Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoid exercise and maintain an unhealthy diet. Rothko subsequently turned his attention to smaller formats, including acrylics on paper. Rothko moved into his studio. Sensing the end was near, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" and would receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death. (Reis later sold the paintings to the Marlborough Gallery at a considerable loss and pocketed the difference with Gallery representatives, the result of which was one of the longest and most heavily hyped legal battles in art history;
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood.
"Tragedy," Joseph Campbell explains, "is the shattering of forms and of our attachment to the forms."
Rothko's art, culminating in the Chapel paintings, represents the tragic impulse by presenting a human response freed from its attachment to prior forms of knowledge. One might accuse Rothko of trying to have it both ways; Rothko's late paintings, including those of his Chapel, may go too far for some viewers; Freed from those last remaining bonds of post-Enlightenment Romanticism we can cynically accept our fated inability of transcendence and focus finally on the true, irrefutable material fact of art: that it can be self-assured, ironic, and profitable, that it can represent, as Campbell observes of comedy, "the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible." As Rothko remarked, "Intuition is the height of rationality. the tragedy of his art is its subjective representation of the impossibility of this communication. It aches for the truth beyond forms yet as a form itself is unable to achieve that which is beyond category, the metaphysical that is, according to Campbell, "absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint, unknowable," that which can be intuited with the entirety of one's being yet is condemned to an utter silence that is, as Rothko once said, "so accurate."
Rothko demanded his paintings be organic, art that "lives and breathes," an object among others.
Legacy
The settlement of his estate became the subject of the famous Rothko Case.
In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, "Homage to Matisse," broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at US $22.5 million dollars.
A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, entitled The Artist's Reality, has been edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and is to be issued by Yale University Press in 2006.
A song commemorating Mark Rothko was penned by Dar Williams for her album, The Honesty Room. It is appropriately titled The Mark Rothko Song.
Quotations
"I am not an abstract painter.
"Pictures must be miraculous."
"The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.
"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls.
"The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions..
In the June 7, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:
"1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
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