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.