Rothko – Triumph of Art over Money and the tragedy of humanity

Dylan Evans (Design1001)

It was an unknown adventure into an unknown space. Mark Rothko became an emblem of American abstract expressionism – though he shunned the abstract label, and struggled with the American capitalism that drove the commissioning of his work. In 1958, he was offered the equivalent of 3M euros ($35k at the time) to do the paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, New York. This, the Seagram commission, was the greatest challenge of his career.

Born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia) in 1903, Mark Rothkowitz, the son of a pharmacist, feared the pogroms - anti-Semitic riots of the time. Mark Rothkowitz gained a scholarship to Yale – thought to be Yale’s way of getting his friend Aaron Director to take up a place at Yale. Rothko was labelled a know it all, by his elders – though he had a big heart, and a big mouth to match. He dropped out of Yale, and pursued his creative itch, and vision that art could change the world.

It is because of this belief that art could change the world, that he could walk away from the Four Seasons job. He saw it as the greatest challenge of his career. This work would be a wordless teaching, an antidote to the triviality of modern life. The scale of the work was different to what he had done before. He found that sending a picture out into the world was a risky, unfeeling act – that the picture both lived, and died, by companionship - expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.

Emmigrating to the USA in 1913, he moved to New York in the Twenties, enrolling in the New School of Design. His style stemmed from thinking about the primevality of children’s drawings. The initial works weren’t that good – due to the part of him thinking too much while composing the works. He progressed to the Subway series of works, which captured doom, alienation, and mournful architecture. The turning point here was his use of colours – a dramatic departure, which took another 20 years to hone.

In the thirties, a key influence was Matisse (see Red Room, left), in how colour was liberated from specific objects. Objects were no longer a particular colour – the painting was of a particular colour. Thinking too hard about his work was still an issue, and he went back to the books, working on myths and

monsters, from Nietzsche - though all the while improving his eye for conveying tragedy and doom (see Gethsemane, right). His archaeological excursions into the land of the dead were overtaken in the real world, with the advent of the Second World War. Rothko was acutely short sighted – meaning armed service was not a question he had to answer. The conflict was a cross roads for art, and with America being seen as the saviour of Western Civilisation from Fascism, Rothko’s contribution was to an Art manifesto to lead through the moral crisis of a world in shambles. Flowers and reclining nudes were no longer relevant.

The tragic notion of the image is always present in my mind – I can’t point it

out, there are no skull and bones. The whole problem of art is to establish

human values… It’s about, and of the world – sensuality, irony, death. The

sense of the tragic is always with me when I paint. - Rothko

It was this unbearably weighty feeling for human tragedy that Rothko wanted to bring into the four seasons. He was only interested in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy ecstasy, doom. People breaking down and crying when confronted with his pictures was proof to him that he was communicating these emotions. His dream was to give his paintings the emotional force of the old masters.

Indeed, Michelangelo’s Library in the Church of San Lorenzo (Florence) provided a major inspiration to the Seagram work. The sub-conscious influence was that Michelangelo made the viewers feel that they are trapped, with all the doors and windows in the room ‘bricked up’, leaving the viewers the only option – which was to butt their heads against a wall, forever. This was the feeling that Rothko wanted to give the people

dining in Manhattan’s smartest restaurant. With America caught between the Bomb and the supermarket, an unreal manufactured way of life was perceived by Rothko and a number of other New York based artists. Their paintings would fight back, reconnect people with physical reality, and the truth of what it is to be human. They would do it in a

new way. After the holocaust and the bomb, it wasn’t possible for them to paint figures without mutilating them. They asked whether just colours and shapes could move people, in the same way that Michelangelo had. Pure expression of feeling was what drove Rothko, along with Pollock and De Kooning, to abandon painting things.

Visionary and revelatory, a new world on the canvas emerged. Abstract Expressionism’s first wave was action-painting – with Pollock and De Kooning as major agitators. Closely followed by the second wave – Colour field painting –Stills, Newman and Rothko were experimenting with the use of flat areas or fields of colour to induce contemplation in the viewer. Being the passive side of abstract expressionism, colour field painting needed large scale and size, which was key to creating their desired effect. Their monumental scale was not for the sake of heroic grandeur, but for the sake of creating an intimate relationship with the viewer.

The new language of feeling that Rothko has been groping towards for two decades finally revealed itself. These were what are now called his multiforms, with the first made in 1946. Dramatic, creating a movement all of their own – swelling, and shrinking, dissolving, seeping, and hovering above the viewer. Rothko paintings began to sell with prices trebling between 1954 and 1957. These paintings are composed of two or three horizontal or vertical rectangles of different colours, varying in width or in height, on an even coloured background. The rectangles filled with colour, edges being blurred into soft-focus by washing or staining with shifting luminous intensities. These blurred squares and rectangles envelope the viewer, creating a near floating sensation. When asked about the best way of viewing his large multiforms, he replied that the viewer should stand right back – about 18 inches (45 cm).

Prettiness in painting was not his aim – power was what he was after - the power to take people somewhere where they would recover their humanity. The earlier multiforms used bright and vibrant colours – lots of reds and yellows - up to 1957, whereupon a darker more sombre palate was used, right into his latter years. Dark reds, greys, browns, blues and black were prevalent, replacing many of the brighter reds, yellows and oranges of the preceding multiforms. He did not want his art to be classed as beauty, since this would infer that they were no more than interior decorations for the rich. While his pictures are beautiful, it is tragic, violent, sacrificial performances

evoking the most extreme sensations of doom and ecstasy, that he is bent on communicating. This art would vanquish the appetites of the diners in the restaurant. His paintings would swallow the swallowers, touching the vain and shallow as they ate, making them surrender to his art. The restaurant was open, and he had completed around 40 of the paintings – all still in his studio. The paintings were different to his previous multiforms, in that they were in ‘landscape’ format, rather than portrait. He and his second wife Mell went to eat at the Four Seasons, and while sat amongst the millionaires dining, his heart and confidence sank like a stone. Ultimately, he concluded that people who would pay that kind of money for that kind of food would not look at a painting of his. From that point, he knew that his paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons, and he walked away from the project and from 3M Euros. The paintings remained in his storage until 1968. The final series of Seagram Murals were dispersed and hangs in three locations: London’s Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

He became an alcoholic, a chain smoker, and his second marriage was heading south. Shadowed by this melancholy, his art became darker and more intense, just as modern art went pop. The style of the past 15 years was not in demand by the galleries, and his response was defensive – heading into a raven black period of painting, called his Black-Grey period. He was commissioned to produce a set of murals for a chapel to be built in Houston in 1965, giving him freedom to install what he wanted. While he didn’t live to see the paintings installed, he felt that they were his most important artistic expression. He took his own life in 1970, and a year later, the chapel in Houston was dedicated to him.

In 2008, the Tate Modern reunited their Rothko paintings with the paintings in Japan. It was this exhibition where I first saw Rothko. The Tate paintings were chosen by Rothko himself, and given a dedicated space – the Rothko Rooms. The exhibition held the London and Japan

Seagram murals, the Black-Form paintings, his large-scale Brown and Grey works on paper, and his last series of Black on Grey paintings. I have never been so surprised by art in my life. The images on the brochures simply did not convey the power the images would have on my when I would see them for real. The depths of tragedy, of raw emotional doom, of a darkness I had never before imagined made me shake. On reflection afterward, it is the capturing of this horror that make the pictures so

transcendental. Rothko succeeded in the same way as his heroes – Rembrandt and Turner – to capture something that is forever relevant. The tragedy is that the emotions that are held in the images are created perpetually in humanity. With the roots of what prompted Rothko now fading in memory, new events are continually created that remind us of the tragedy of humanity.