Remembering the Radical Abstract Expressionist Artist Mark Rothko ( September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970)

 

Mark Rothko ( Marcus Rothkowitz ) abstract expressionist artist and anarchist was born in  the working-class, Jewish town of  Dvinsk, now known as Daugavpils, Latvia on the 25th of September 1903, the fourth child born to Jacob and Anna Rothkovich. As Russia was a hostile environment for Zionist Jews, Jacob immigrated to the United States with his two older sons in 1910, finally sending for the rest of his family in 1913. They settled in Portland, Oregon. His father  was a pharmacist of modest means who believed strongly in a secular and political education for his children. The youngest of four siblings, Rothko was the only one to study the Talmud in a family long affected by fear of their homeland’s anti-Semitism. 

Jacob passed away of  cancer shortly after their immigration to the United States, leaving them without means for support. Only 10 years old at the time, his fathers untimely death a year later shook him badly, but Rothko continued his studies at school, and  was forced to take jobs in his uncle’s warehouse to help his mother, Sonia, make ends meet.. It resulted in a lingering sense of bitterness over his lost childhood. This tragedy was the first in a series of the events that would torture the soul of a sensitive and emotional artist throughout life.

Among the workers, though  he became a passionate proponent of labor rights and revolutionary politics. Portland at the time was the epicentre of revolutionary activity in the US at the time, and the area where the revolutionary syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World, was strongest. Marcus, having grown up around radical workers' meetings, attended meetings of the IWW and with other anarchists like Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, where he developed strong oratorical skills he would later use in defence of Surrealism.

 He graduated early from Lincoln High School, showing more interest in music than visual art. He was awarded a scholarship to Yale University, but soon found the environment at Yale conservative. racist and elitist. As the U.S.’s entry into World War I encouraged a push for immigrants to assimilate and the Bolshevik Revolution (which his family supported) brought on the first Red Scare, Rothko promoted free expression by introducing a letters-to-the-editor column in his high school newspaper. While attending Yale he and a couple of friends founded the publication the Saturday Evening Pest, which promised to critique “international politics, capitalism, socialism, immigration, and poverty.”  He left the university without graduating in 1923, and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree forty-six years later.

 He spoke four languages- Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, and experienced many cultures which greatly enriched his art. After leaving Yale, Mark Rothko made his way to New York City, as he put it, "to bum about and starve a bit." He studied in the Parsons New School for Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky, American avant-garde painter of Armenian origin. Over the next few years, he had taken odd jobs before he enrolled at early American Cubist painter Max Weber's still life and figure drawing classes at the Art Students League. A highly criticized figure in the art world, Weber was likewise a Russian Jew who taught the philosophies and methods of Modernism’s major movements. Rothko in particular admired the work of Expressionists Henri Matisse and Milton Avery, and his early paintings emulated their abstracted figurative styles with flat areas of color. It was also under Weber that Rothko began to consider his art as a means of religious and emotional expression.  According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. Rothko's early works were mostly portraits, nudes, and images of urban scenes.

In 1932, he married jewellery designer Edith Sachar, but separated from her in the summer of 1937. They reconciled several months later, yet their relationship remained tense

By the mid-1930s, the effects of the Great Depression were being felt throughout American society, and Rothko had become concerned with the social and political implications of mass unemployment. Working in the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration, Rothko met many other artists, yet he felt most at ease with a group that consisted mainly of other Russian Jewish painters. This group, which included such figures as Adolph Gottlieb, Joseph Solman and John Graham, showed together at Gallery Secession in 1934, and became known as "The Ten". They sought to communicate human emotion and drama through their paintings.

In the 1930s, Rothko continued to explore different styles and methods. His Subway series depicted the underground subway environments of New York City in a melancholy palette. Although realistic and immediately recognizable with figures throughout, the series emphasized the architectural spaces as abstract compositional arrangements, a key concept he would later develop in his mature work. 

On February 21, 1938, Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke sudden deportation of American Jews. Concerned about anti-Semitism in America and Europe, Rothko in 1940 abbreviated his name from "Marcus Rothkowitz" to "Mark Rothko." The name "Roth," a common abbreviation, was still identifiably Jewish, so he settled upon "Rothko."

As World War II took hold of American life, Rothko and his fellow artists began to depart from representational work in favor of the symbolism of Surrealism. He became a passionate advocate for the style, stating that, “A time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.” Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and nature scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing interest with form, space, and colour. The world crisis of war lent this search an immediacy because he insisted that the new subject matter have a social impact, yet be able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values. 

In his essay, "The Romantics Were Prompted," published in 1949, Rothko argued that the "archaic artist ... found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods" in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. For Rothko, "without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

The tragedy of World War II seems to have had the irreversible consequences for the fragile psyche of the artist. His dream (not destined to be realized) would be to paint a series of canvases for the museum dedicated to the Holocaust. Throughout his life, in most of his works, he sought to express the depth of despair and horror before the deeds of the humanity.

On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Sachar separated again. Rothko suffered a long depression following their divorce. Thinking that a change of scenery might help, Rothko returned to Portland. From there he travelled to Berkeley, where he met artist Clifford Still, and the two began a close relationship. Still's deeply abstract paintings would be of considerable influence on Rothko's later works.

In the autumn of 1943, Rothko returned to New York, where he met noted collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, who was initially reluctant to take on his work. Rothko’s one-man show at Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in late 1945 resulted in few sales (prices ranging from $150 to $750) and in less-than-favourable reviews. During this period, Rothko had been stimulated by Still's abstract landscapes of colour, and his style shifted away from surrealism. Rothko's experiments in interpreting he unconscious symbolism of everyday forms had run their course. His future lay with abstraction.
Rothko's 1945 masterpiece, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, illustrates his newfound propensity towards abstraction. It has been interpreted as a meditation on Rothko's courtship of his second wife, Mary Ellen "Mell " Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in the spring of 1945. The painting presents, in subtle grays and browns, two human-like forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colours. The rigid rectangular background foreshadows Rothko's later experiments in pure colour. The painting was completed, not coincidentally, in the year the Second World War ended.

 He and Mary had two children, one of whom would later publish a book Rothko had written called The Artist's Reality. It is believed the book was written in the 1940s when Rothko took a break from painting and read a lot of mythology and also existentialist works by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche.

By the beginning of the 1950s, his signature style, ragged rectangular forms on the colored fields, which employed shimmering color to convey a sense of spirituality. Rothko's art is distinguished by a rare degree of sustained concentration on pure pictorial properties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale, accompanied by the conviction that those elements could disclose the presence of a high philosophical truth. Visual elements such as luminosity, darkness, broad space, and the contrast of colors have been linked, by the artist himself as well as other commentators, to profound themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime. Rothko, however, generally avoided explaining the content of his work, believing that the abstract image could directly represent the fundamental nature of "human drama." 

His works began to be in great demand, putting Rothko in the top ten of the most highly paid artists of his time.For the next 20 years of his life, Rothko would work in this groundbreaking format,exploring  colours in all its depths and hues,,developing a new language of feeling, exploring freedom and movement. achieving an impressive range of emotion and mood. The massive scale of the paintings intentionally envelops the viewer, creating a feeling of intimacy. Rothko hung the paintings close to the floor in groups, with low lighting, and required that no other art works be shown in proximity. The effect is quietly meditative, for many inviting spiritual contemplation. One of his foremost collectors, Dominque de Menil, summed up this late work by saying the paintings, “…evoke the tragic mystery of our perishable condition. The silence of God. The unbearable silence of God.”

Rothko said that his paintings were large in order to make the viewer part of the experience rather than separate from the painting. In fact, he preferred to have his paintings shown together in an exhibit in order to create a greater impact of being contained or enveloped by the paintings, rather than broken up by other artworks. He said that the paintings were monumental not to be "grandiose", but in fact, to be more "intimate and human."

In 1960 the Phillips Gallery built a special room dedicated to displaying Mark Rothko's painting, called The Rothko Room. It contains four paintings by the artist, one painting on each wall of a small room, giving the space a meditative quality.  

In 1961, Rothko was given  major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After years of teaching art to subsidise his paintings, this show finally brought him the success he deserved.

Rothko was then commissioned in 1964 by John and Dominique de Menial to create a meditative space filled with his paintings created specifically for the space. The Rothko Chapel, designed in collaboration with architects Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone, and Eugene Aubry, was ultimately completed in 1971, although Rothko died in 1970 so did not see the final building. It is an irregular octagonal brick building that holds fourteen of Rothko's mural paintings. The paintings are Rothko's signature floating rectangles, although they are darkly hued - seven canvases with hard-edged black rectangles on maroon ground, and seven purple tonal paintings.

It is an interfaith chapel that people visit from all over the world. According to The Rothko Chapel website,"The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It’s an epicenter for civil rights activists, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves. It’s a destination for the 90,000 people of all faiths who visit each year from all parts of the world. It is the home of the Óscar Romero Award."

Mark Rothko supported the social revolutionary ideas of his youth throughout his life. In particular, he was all for the artists' total freedom of expression, which was compromised by the market, as he felt it. This belief often put him at odds with the art world establishment, leading him to publicly respond to critics and occasionally refuse the commissions, sales and exhibitions. As a mature painter, Rothko signed an open letter with eighteen other artists (collectively called the “Irascibles”) to Roland L. Redmond, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, protesting against the museum’s forthcoming exhibition “American Painters, 1900–50,” which favoured figural work to the Abstract Expressionist art then prevalent in the city. In 1959 he reportedly scrapped a commission by the Four Seasons because he didn’t want his work hanging in the hotel’s outrageously expensive restaurant.

 Later in life with the death of the Russian Revolution, the destruction of the Spanish Revolution by Communists and Fascists, and the rise of the Nazis Rothko became disillusioned as to whether there was any hope for social change. But he claimed "I am still an anarchist"!

Rothko was both fortified by his powerful Jewish heritage, a heritage which is one of the oldest, most tenacious and demanding to be found anywhere - one embodying a collective superego and an ethic of cosmic proportion. Rothko himself did not actually adhere to any particular religious faith, but to me his work remains  very mystical imbued with so many layers of meaning.

In 1968, Rothko suffered an aortic aneurysm, this brush with death would shadow him for the rest of his life. Despite his fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion and a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion and that the true purpose of his work was not being grasped by collectors, critics, or audiences. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential, and therefore, must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those who inquired after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is 

 

"so accurate." "My paintings' surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles, you can find everything I want to say."

 

Rothko began to insist that he was not an abstractionist and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colourist. His interest was

l“ only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point. ”

Ignoring doctor's orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. "Highly nervous, thin, restless" was his friend Dore Ashton's description of him at this time. However, he did follow the medical advice given not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper.

Meanwhile, Rothko's marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship. Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year's Day 1969, and he moved into his studio.

Despite the phenomenal demand for his art within his lifetime, the artist was haunted by depression, poor health and alcohol addictions and likely an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. On February 25, 1970, after being unable  to recover from this  phase of deep sadness, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko's assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had sliced his arms with a razor found lying at his side. The autopsy revealed that he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was sixty-six years old.  

 

 

He had in his possession nearly 800 paintings  yet within months of the funeral, his three trusted friends, acting as executors, relinquished his entire legacy of paintings to the powerful, international Marlborough Galleries (run by Frank Lloyd) for a fraction of their real worth on terms suspiciously unfavourable to the estate. The suit that Rothko’s daughter brought against the executors and Marlborough rocked the art world with its shocking revelations of corruption in the international art trade: from the deceptions practiced on Rothko when he was alive to the scandals after his death involving conspiracies and cover-ups, double dealings and betrayals, missing paintings and manipulated markets, phony sales and laundered profits, forgery and fraud.

After a long court case his works were divided between his two children and the Mark Rothko Foundation .In 1984, the foundation’s paintings were donated to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel. The largest and best portion of these went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A collection of murals originally commissioned for the Seagram Building in New York City is held by the Tate in London. Rothko's grave at East Marion Cemetery, East Marion, New York..

Painting consumed Rothko’s life, and although he did not receive the attention he felt his work deserved in his own troubled lifetime, his fame has increased dramatically in the years following his death. At odds with the more formally rigorous artists among the Abstract Expressionists, Rothko nevertheless explored the compositional potential of colour and form on the human psyche.

While his work is greatly admired by many, and is remembered as a boundary-breaking pioneer of 20th-century art. his detractors either view his attempts at expressing the sublime as over ambitious or see his paintings as boring  and unimpressive. Personally I was once fortunate to go and  see an exhibition of his work in the Tate and standing before his huge, mute abstract canvasses was drawn into an experience that required no real knowledge of the aesthetics of art - to something quite transcendent, and to feel, if only momentarily, something of the sublime spirituality he relentlessly sought to evoke.it was pretty powerful stuff !  His work remains forever intimate and timeless.