Heavenly Rectangles
Negotiating the serpentine
corridors of the big Rothko show at the National Gallery is like going through
a tunnel that keeps getting darker only to find that the light at the end is an
oncoming train. The show opens amid New York subway platforms, a favorite
subject of Rothko's during the 1930s. Isolated figures descend the stairs in
this twilit realm, hemmed in by a geometric cage of bars and pillars (Entrance to
Subway, 1938). In an interesting catalog essay, the curator of the show,
Jeffrey Weiss, points out that subways had a special meaning for
Jewish-American artists like Rothko. In Alfred Kazin's memoir, A Walker in
the City , the subway ride from Brownsville to Manhattan "quantified the
vast physical and social distance that existed between the Jews of Brooklyn and
the 'real' New York." For Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, in
1903, the distance was even greater, and once he'd made it to the "real"
Manhattan--his Museum of Modern Art show of 1961 marked his arrival--he found
that he was still in the dark.
Rothko
immigrated to America--to Portland, Ore.--in 1913. His father, a pharmacist,
died a year later. His mother, whose smotheringly protective presence critics
have discerned in some of his early paintings, watched over Marcus and his
three siblings. A precocious student, Rothko went to Yale on scholarship and
dropped out after two years, moving to New York in 1923, where, except for a
brief stint studying acting back in Portland, he lived for the rest of his
life. For the next 25 years, Rothko was a struggling artist in every way,
groping for an appropriate medium to convey his intense inner life. He studied
at the Art Students League, taught sporadically, and exhibited with various
networks of artists, including one group who called themselves--when one of
their number left--"The Ten Who Are Nine." In 1932 he married Edith Sachar, who
was far more successful in her business of designing jewelry than he was in
selling his paintings.
The war years brought a radical shift in Rothko's style. He
went from painting realistic New York scenes to concocting mythological motifs
with titles like Archaic Idol and Tentacles of Memory . In a way,
the shift was less abrupt than it seemed, for Rothko traded in one set of
underground subjects, the subway, for another, the "depth psychology" strata of
the unconscious, with dreamscape bric-a-brac lifted from Surrealist painters
Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. In paintings such as Hierarchical Birds (1944), the messy profusion of feathers and
tails and eyes is meant to convey the tangle of the psyche, while the three
layers of color in the background might correspond to Freud's tripartite
division of superego, ego, and id.
Then
Rothko made a decisive discovery, one of the turning points in the history of
American art. He realized that the weird birds and body parts and eyes added
nothing to his paintings. The boldly simplified work of friends such as Barnett
Newman and Clyfford Still (the California abstractionist he'd met on a trip
west in 1944) may have encouraged him to banish imagery from his work. Rothko
made the background of paintings such as Hierarchical Birds --the richly
painted stacked rectangles of contrasting colors--the foreground, and he never
looked back. By 1949, he had established the "classic" format he would explore
for the next 20 years. He also had a new name (having shortened Marcus
Rothkowitz to Mark Rothko in 1940), a new wife, and a new gallery. His mother
died in 1948, however, and Rothko went into a prolonged depression, an early
episode of the periodic despondency he would continue to suffer.
During the 1950s, the paintings just kept getting better.
The National Gallery owns a beautiful canvas of 1953 in which a rectangle of
magenta hovers atop a larger rectangle of black. Once you've registered that
relationship, you realize that a layer of orange smolders underneath and
flickers at the seam of the two colors. No paintings in the show are more
ravishing than the brace of monumental canvases Rothko painted in 1957 in a
garage in New Orleans, while teaching at Tulane University. These
"breakthrough" paintings, as Rothko himself called them, with their thick
layers of paint laid on with big brushes purchased at a hardware store, give
the lie to the critic Clement Greenberg's influential claim that Rothko "seems
to soak his paint into the canvas to get a dyer's effect and avoid the
connotations of a discrete layer of paint on top of the surface." Greenberg
wanted to enlist Rothko in his own narrative of American painting moving
irrevocably toward "flatness" and so-called "color-field" painting.
Some of
Rothko's '50s work does look stained rather than painted, but it's not the most
powerful work. As painter Brice Marden notes in a lively interview in the
exhibition catalog, Rothko's brushwork is the most compelling thing about him.
"He was one of the last painterly painters," maintains Marden, adding that
Rothko's great composition of purple, white, and red ( Untitled , 1953) is
"like an impressionist work, because of the kind of touch involved." These
paintings have an almost calligraphic energy.
By the late '50s Rothko was a very successful painter, and
he hated it. At least, he distrusted the grounds of his success. Ever since the
mythological paintings, he had aimed somehow to go beyond painting, to plug
into the inner recesses of the soul. He refused to talk about technique,
angrily denied that he was a colorist, and challenged his viewers to find the
tragedy lurking in the canvases (Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy was
his favorite book). "I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of
their surface," he claimed. But the more violence Rothko pumped into the
pictures, the more plush and collectible they turned out to be. Greenberg,
writing in 1958, took pains to deny that Rothko's paintings were
"luxury-objects," arguing, rather mysteriously, that they managed to "escape
geometry through geometry itself."
The
tension between luxury object and tragic icon came to a head in 1958, when
Rothko accepted a commission to supply a series of murals for Philip Johnson's
Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's new Seagram Building in New York
City. In a deliberate attempt to defy the locale, where, as Rothko said, "the
richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off," Rothko darkened
his palette. Several of the resulting paintings are on view in the National
Gallery show, scumbled swaths of deep red, maroon, and black. Eventually Rothko
backed out of the project, returning the cash advance.
Rothko's last decade is like some strange twist on the
Midas myth. As he tries to instill more and more tragedy into his work, it
turns automatically to gold. He is invited to John F. Kennedy's inauguration,
has a "Rothko room" installed in the Phillips Collection in Washington,
D.C.--the first of several such rooms in museums around the world--and accepts
a commission to decorate a chapel for the de Menil family in Houston (known as
the Rothko Chapel). From 1965 to 1967, he works exclusively on the chapel
project, and the paintings become so dark that some of them are virtually black
on black. Meanwhile, he is chain-smoking, drinking heavily, and abusing
barbiturates. His doctor later tells Rothko's biographer that Rothko's
"greatest sources of consolation were calories and alcohol." He has a heart
attack in 1968, leaves his wife in 1969, and on Feb. 25, 1970, slits his wrists
and dies on the studio floor.
Rothko's triumphantly tragic
career resembles what Robert Lowell called the "generic life" of his own
generation of poets. For Rothko, too, there were the years of apprenticeship,
the hard-won discovery of a classic but ultimately restrictive format (Rothko's
stacked rectangles are not unlike Lowell's sonnets and John Berryman's "dream
songs"), the succession of wives, the acclaim, and the descent into alcohol,
paranoia, depression, and suicide. Rothko's journey into literal and figurative
darkness left behind a shimmering trail of canvases that mark for many people
the high-water mark of spiritual beauty and emotion in modern art. He suffered
the strange fate of many artists who aim for the sublime, then find their work
enlisted in other all-too-human narratives. At a special reception for the
opening of the National Gallery exhibition, Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed
that her first date with the future president was to go see a Rothko show at
Yale.
