Untitled, 1956
“I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else,” Mark Rothko told Selden Rodman for Conversations with Artists, published in 1961. “I am interested in only expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on…”
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His intense, apocalyptic vision of humanity may have been formed in his youngest years, as a child born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903. Growing up in an anti-religious family of Jewish origin in the final years of the Tsarist regime, Rothko (ne Markus Rothkowitz) left his native land at the age of 10 and emigrated to the United States.
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Like his father before him, Rothko was a Marxist, passionate about workers’ rights. He received a scholarship to Yale, which he entered 1921. He found the bougie atmosphere of the Ivy League to be both elitist and racist, eventually dropping out at the end of his sophomore year.
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He moved to New York in 1923, and decided to take up art after visiting the Art Students League. The 1920s were a major decade for Modern art, as Dada, Cubism, Supermatism, and Surrealism had liberated the artist from the confines of Western art that had them hemmed up with aesthetic and ideological concerns that had dominated the form since the Renaissance.
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No. 14 (Untitled), 1955
Free from the strictures of representation and narrative, Rothko went his own way, forsaking both the traditions of painting as well as his family’s expectations that he pursue a more lucrative career. In 1940, he adopted the name “Mark Rothko” in an attempt to avoid the rabid anti-Jewish sentiment that had sprouted across Europe and throughout America.
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As an artist, Rothko came into his own as he discovered the inherent power of pure aesthetics to stimulate emotions and mediate feeling. He intuitively understood the necessity of mythology and the way in which it worked to tap into the ever-flowing undercurrents of the collective unconscious. It was here, in this ethereal netherworld, that Rothko’s paintings began to manifest and achieve their goals.
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The month, Rothko returns the for once again with Rothko: The Color Field Paintings, a sumptuous new monograph from Chronicle, along with Mark Rothko: Reflection, an exhibition of 11 masterpieces on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, September 24, 2017–July 1, 2018.
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The glory of Rothko’s work is how timeless they are, how they both capture the ethos of the era in which they were made and transcend that specificity, so that they are eternally new and fresh, as much as radical now as they were then. It may be that this is due to the fact that no matter how much derivative work they inspired, nothing but nothing even comes close. The imitators pale and fade away in the presence of Rothko’s genius.
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Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on orange), 1955
The human dimensionality of the work becomes a portal that transports us to another realm that exists both inside and outside ourselves. The works are as exhilarating as they are stilling, vibrant paths to the center of that which exists beyond words, the ineffable, ephemeral essence of God.
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“The classic works, or sectionals, are Rothko’s signature works, and are well known for the deep feelings they evoke and their ability to articulate the language of the sublime,” his son Christopher Rothko writes in the foreword of Rothko: The Color Field Paintings.
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He continues: “These works touch us because they know exactly ‘where we live.’ They speak to us, imparting a message akin to ‘this is what it feels like to feel this way.’ They are essentially the painted expression of what it is to be human and alive, filled with joy and sorrow, aspiration and despair, fears and hopes, and fears about our hopes…. My father had summoned his full voice—bold, impassioned, and confident, and, if occasionally bombastic, never strident or shouted.”
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The paintings are operatic in nature and symphonic in sensation, transcending the visual realm, delving below the depths of the surface of things, which we truly understand when we use our eyes to perceive, rather than simply see.
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All artwork: © Mark Rothko