Mark Rothko: To Doubt Is To See
‘In a society where painters lack ‘official’ status, the power to confer legitimacy is held by museum directors and plutocrats.’
Short Introduction
Biography is a strange thing. We read it to get a sense of a person, but on another level we read it to get a sense of ourselves, to understand the measure of ourselves against the life of another, often long-dead person, from a different time and often a different culture. The further away from time we are to a person, the more strange and bizarre seems the culture in which they lived, as do their habits, fashions, vices and everything else that influenced their world view. Looking at early 20th century camera footage of New York City, San Francisco, or Paris, widely available all over YouTube in re-mastered, colorized and frame speed corrected versions, one gets the feeling that what we’re looking at is not New York City as it existed only slightly more than a hundred years ago, but a totally alien world or planet on which a different version of New York City was planted. New York circa 1950s seems a little less alien because of the era’s proximity to ours, but what would we say of New York of the 1850s if we had a chance to witness it?
The point of biography is to flatten that difference and to disalienate the uncanny similarities that continue to exist between those eras. We can read a biography of Julius Caesar and feel that humans were not really all that different from this day to that. Consequently, the biographical account is always more than just an account of a life of a single individual. With this in mind, I have been reading James Breslin’s 1993 biography of Mark Rothko, a work of heroic proportions and possibly ‘the’ authoritative account of the modernist painter’s life. I’ve been fascinated by Rothko’s work since I ‘discovered’ his work many years ago, even though I knew very little about his life – the paintings always seemed much more important. Reading the biography now, it feels like I’m looking at the paintings for the first time again, not as something alien or from and alien world, but as something much closer and intimate. All of Rothko’s paintings, from the early subway scenes of the 1930s to the opaque ‘content-free’ abstract paintings of the 1950s and 60s, are themselves the biography on which Breslin’s account of Rothko is based. Rothko comes through those paintings as strongly as he does through the words of the author.
What follows is a piece made up of various mental notes and observations I’ve been making. These ‘readings’ may become a regular feature of ‘a secret plot,’ I don’t know. I’m not attempting to write yet another account of Rothko’s life, because there is a need for it - he is after all one of the most famous and recognizable artists of, well, ever. But I am writing about Rothko to understand him better personally and by the same token to reacquaint myself with his work, that had major influence on my own.
Part I
No other 20th century artist had expressed the tragedy and pain of that century better than Mark Rothko, though there are plenty of contenders. His deceivingly simple paintings of color fields and fuzzy rectangles blending together in amoeba-like fashion belie the horror and depressive states that Rothko felt while confronting vast world historical events, deeply unsettling family problems like divorce, the death of his mother and the loss of his friends and his own psychological issues stemming from long bouts of depression, all of which coagulated in an amorphous art, seemingly devoid of content but brimming with emotion. The more vibrant the colors became, the more sullen and darkly obsessed became their creator. A drinker and chain smoker, Rothko spent much of his life bouncing between highly agitated states of creativity, during which he could produce perhaps fifty paintings in a single summer session, and depression low enough that he could not bring himself to hold a brush in his hand. Rothko painted with an urgency he felt coming at him from all corners of his professional career, one that had first reduced him to a non-being, because as he knew ‘in a society where painters lack ‘official’ status, the power to confer legitimacy is held by museum directors and plutocrats.’ These same directors and plutocrats would later elevate Rothko’s career to heights with which the painter would become uneasy and continue to fight internally until his suicide in 1970. The impossibility of reconciliation of Rothko’s socialist leanings with his worldly successes is in a sense underscored by the twists and turns that his paintings took during those years. Rothko’s rise begins at a time when he’s out exclaiming that ‘Due to the provincial position in which the American artist was pushed, he had nothing to lose and everything, a world, to gain,’ a phrase directed at himself more than any of his colleagues or the thousands of other artists laboring away in their studios.
A switch had turned on when Marcus Rothkowitz became Mark Rothko, the artist formally recognizing his Russian Jewish past as behind him and welcoming the new American counterpart as a form of rebirth. This was an attempted radical break with the past underscored by the political implications of modernism with its intent to overturn everything that smacked of the ‘old world,’ except that in Rothko’s case, advancement of lofty political ideals always took a backseat to personal circumstance. By ‘killing’ Rothkowitz the new Rothko was free to join the burgeoning modernist abstraction movement with the caveat that European abstraction was to him a dead weight, an albatross hung around the neck of progressive artists looking to extract themselves from the influence of Europe as the source of legitimacy conferred on the American art world. But Rothko had never quite eliminated Marcus Rothkowitz. That part of himself he would wrestle with for the rest of his life and even in death the two parts seem to be compartmentalized within the figure of Rothko, where one cannot exist without the other. The artist in exile or emigration, just as Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno would write, remains forever split and aware of that splitting. This kind of artist that Rothko was, Adorno wrote ‘lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him’ no matter how much knowledge he can muster of the political and social systems of power and how well he can navigate the daily routine of work, family and social engagement ‘he is always astray. Between the reproduction of his own existence under the monopoly of mass culture, and impartial responsible work, yawns an irreconcilable breach.’ It is this ‘irreconcilable breach’ that Rothko is trying to reproduce within his painting, because modern American art of that time, the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, was anything but American or devoid of European influence.
When Rothko travelled to Europe in 1950, he and his second wife Mell, toured France, Italy and England, their itinerary focusing primarily on visits to see the works of the Old Masters of European art. Rothko came away unimpressed by the entire experience. The work of the Dominican monk Fra Angelico was the only thing that Rothko truly loved. He was drawn to Fra Angelico’s bright tempera colors and the ‘sourceless, evenly dispersed light and his meditative serenity.’ It was here that Rothko was truly impressed and stimulated by the ‘physical and social circumstances of the paintings,’ declaring that ‘as an artist you have to be a thief and steal a place for yourself on the rich man’s wall,’ thus underscoring his base emotions toward the purpose of art as a spiritual, religious and anarchic activity. Forever torn between success and doubt, Rothko’s two sides were constantly at odds with one another. As an artist he sought ‘official status’ he saw as inherently existing within the world of Fra Angelico, but was dismayed at the way that such status was conferred on the modern artist through fame and money. As fame and wealth were finally heaved upon Rothko, his uneasiness increased, because in real terms he was moving away from the spiritual, rather than toward it. Rothko, unlike Fra Angelico, could not simply renounce society, despite the emotional and spiritual harm he often experienced in the midst of fellow human beings while in one of his long drawn out depressive episodes. Ironically, his friends remember Rothko as gregarious, talkative, generous with his time spent in the company of others. They also remember his chain smoking, love of drinking and easily bruised ego. His paintings are drowning in the tensions Rothko felt between the Old and the New world, because he, the Jewish Russian emigrant, embodied that tension. Retreat into oneself in such a circumstance would mean spiritual death and the death of his painting.
But Rothko’s break came precisely at the moment when he realized that he could retain a portion of the Old World within the New, just as much as he was able to retain classic painting methods to paint entirely new and modern paintings. His radical shift would thus always be incomplete, but his work would thrive through that incompleteness. The way he felt about the art world, or the world at large, was always a case of personal projection. His paintings and the ways he felt about them, his inability to lose control over them and in many cases to sell them, became a fetishized object of his political aspirations. With his life in someone else’s control, whether the university that paid him to teach, or his dealers that sold his work, Rothko could exercise his dominion over the way that his paintings were received, exhibited, looked at, and discussed as a kind of last resort. Rothko, a man of little means for most of his life, who struggled for recognition and his ‘official’ status, riddled with doubt and anxiety over money, status and importance, saw to it that his art would become the one place from which he could attack the dangerous and conservative world outside his own, and by the same token to exorcise his own Old World conservatism that impeded his progress.
Never quite committed to a total dismantling of the figure-ground relationship or the image in his paintings, Rothko refused talking about them as if they could be explained. Explaining his pictures would mean alienating the viewer from the experience of the paintings. The spiritual essence with which Rothko imbued his paintings thus began to intersect with his political point of view. And it was his political struggle that morphed into a struggle with the museums and curators who wanted to exhibit his paintings, as if that struggle meant that he was indirectly having an influence on the world outside of institutional walls. Rothko thus deployed his paintings as de facto stand-ins for the global struggle between the masses and the elite, mirroring his own internal struggle in which Rothko continually rehashed the notion who would get to see his paintings and for whom were they ultimately painted.
That Rothko’s paintings are now incredibly valuable and that they decorate and aestheticise the halls of power the world over, from USA to UAE, is of course beyond paradoxical, perhaps ironic given Rothko’s radically leftist political views, as if all the existential angst, struggle and doubt of the artist contained within them, was either purposely ignored or sublimated as a modern ritual fetish object of capitalism’s power brokers. In his lifetime, Rothko would’ve been opposed to both. In his milieu, he was one of many who professed their allegiance to leftist politics and naively saw his work in service to the cause of anti-capitalism. His early attempts at sowing political discord through a short-lived self-published magazine at Yale went largely ignored, but they did germinate much later in his career, after he had already moved to New York, got married and begun to live a modest lower middle-class lifestyle, during which he went to work as a teacher and painted in his spare time.
But family life and radicalism do not mix, so the urgency with which he felt the world around him collapse during the Second World War had to find an outlet in painting. His first abortive attempts at rehashing Greek tragedy in paint, though generally considered in the context in which they were made, are somewhat early forays into the anxiety and perplexity of the upcoming age. As if Rothko and his circle of friends, that included Barnett Newman, had nothing to paint, rather than twiddle their thumbs, they had settled on Greek motifs more or less out of necessity. The ‘American’ art they were used to seeing was too derivative of its European counterparts they considered to be much better, and the Europeans who have settled in New York during the War were swiftly taking over the reins of cultural production at the time. Greek tragedy seemed relevant because of their generalized timeless nature, with their tragic stories, gods and goddesses, able to be plugged into any context, but especially the American, with its rising importance on the world stage. Greek tragedy is high art above all else, because it is primarily concerned with the stories and misfortunes of its elites, kings and queens, princess and princesses, their cousins and extended families, and their fateful interactions with the gods presiding over them from Mount Olympus. From his small New York apartment Rothko could’ve seen his own struggle against the tides of culture through the lens of the ancient Greeks. He believed and wrote about his views on the timeless nature of art he was championing. It was the timelessness that gave the work an air of authority and potency, thus masking its derivative impotence. This was however an important step for Rothko to take, because it forced him to think in opposition to the fashions of the day, forces that tend to keep artists stuck within the channels of acceptability.
Keenly aware of the problem that fashion poses to the painter, Rothko spent a lot of time in conversation with fellow artists, from his quasi-mentor Milton Avery to Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, on topics of overcoming the legacy of European painting and pushing each other’s boundaries. Ironically, as each artist broke with tradition to arrive at a recognizable style, this rupture produced a correlative break within the relationships that the artists had with one another. There were breakthroughs in painting, but the price to be paid for that breakthrough often ended in a falling out. Greek tragedy offered artists like Rothko, Newman, and Pollock a common voice, a common point of departure and a horizon. As each artist developed their own style in the heavily individualistic American tradition, their shared commonalities represented barriers rather than channels toward a single unifying idea. Abstract Expressionism is thus more a designation for a type of painting, a style, a movement, rather than a single group of artists called Abstract Expressionists. At the height of Abstract Expressionism’s influence on the world stage, many AbEx artists were not on speaking terms, notably due to the fact that the primary driver of AbEx were constant progress and ‘renewal’ based around the continual breaking down of tradition introduced by modernism. Anyone caught on the wrong side of the conversation, thought to be impeding the flow of progress in the most radical Greenbergian style, faced the danger of being cast out. Thus began the cycle of a constant churning and replacing of styles on the American art stage.
Part II coming soon(ish)
Thanks for reading! If you enjoy ‘a secret plot’ consider sharing, liking and subscribing.