Mark Rothko
When I think of Mark Rothko I think of a figure in the modern art sale rooms whose paintings can fetch $60m. I think of a sort of social mannerism that goes on at certain levels of the art world, where you're supposed to be so deeply moved by a Rothko that you break down and cry. And I think of a painting style that comes from the 1950s, which is about creating a subtle but powerful impression of a kind of inner glow. The first two are good for gossip but the second one is the real thing. Rothko committed suicide in 1970 in a particularly violent and horrific way; he was found lying on the floor of his studio in a pool of blood, the tendons in the inside of his elbows cut nearly to the bone. A cult of Rothko has grown up around this distressing fact of his life story. Formlessness is seen as brooding foreboding, and Rothko becomes a modern Van Gogh, too sensitive for this world but a great artist of pain who leaves us a painted testimony of profound humane tragic sadness. But a striking feature of the present Rothko touring retrospective (at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, 16 May - 24 August, and arriving at Tate Modern later this year) is how careful and serious Rothko really is as an artist compared to the hysterical and hasty things that are said about him.
Rothko's early paintings are broadly done subtly orchestrated colour compositions in the form of self-portraits and other observed scenes. They are sentimental without being false. In these 1930s pictures of people in the New York subway, couples in the street and nudes in lonely rooms, colour and light are sophisticated. Rothko worked for a while in the theatre as a screen painter. He said it was a profound experience, and it's clear in these pictures that he has that eye for a big arrangement that is characteristic of scene painting but he makes it work on a small scale: he makes fuzziness serve accuracy, and not just act as an artistic affectation.
The combination of precision and chanciness that make early pictures like the 1936 Self Portrait and 1939 'Untitled: Portrait' (showing a boy standing at a window) electric, is still there thirty years later in Rothko's last splashy grey paintings -- which are several metres wide and appear to have been created with broom-like brushes. What both periods of work have in common is directed energy, unity, everything stoked up towards a single aim, to make that sentimental scene or that formless plunge into nothingness seem like a metaphor for recognisable reality, a metaphor for the action of light and colour in the real world. Rothko's pictorial mood is melancholy. The light is greyed, the tone is quiet, the feeling sombre and dignified. These qualities are produced by formal, non ego-driven abstract values, and not by either the clinical depression that Rothko suffered from in the last years of his life, or by any mythological force of romantic genius that propelled him to his last arbitrary and meaningless act.
Mark Rothko, 'Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple', 1949
Oil on canvas 84 1/2 x 68 1/2 inches
Private collection
Copyright 1999 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The early conventional subjects give way in the 1940s to larger more symbolic pictures, with vaguely narrative linear pictograms replacing quivering soulful figures. We're in a generalised world of mythology. The sensibility however doesn't really change: these pictures are enjoyable because of the sense of concentrated light that they all have. He makes form formless in order to bring out light. This sounds glib but Rothko isn't a formulaic artist, he works at forms, changing, altering, fussing, until there is a single convincing colour effect that every element in the painting appears to be part of. On the other hand, the energy that comes off the pictures is a result of spontaneity and improvising: he is going somewhere, he knows something about the limitations of his means, but he never knows if a network of looping white and grey lines will suddenly cohere with the next mark or suddenly collapse into a mess. Stains. Smudges. Nothingness. They're all still there in the end - grey, misty, hazy. But somehow also organisation and space, and a charming dancing world of nutty spiral seashell shapes and Greek mythological nature spirits are pretty much all there too.
Mark Rothko, 'Light Red Over Black', 1957
Oil on canvas
Copyright 1999 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
From the perspective of New York-based cool minimalism in the 1960s, which was in part a reaction against the cult of emotion that Rothko stood for and part a positive response to his stripped down form, Rothko's early stuff seems like a bit of art history that one wants to hurry past. But at this retrospective you see how serious and alive these early '40s paintings really are, with their elegance and shimmer, and their silver greyness, as opposed to when you see them as reproductions in an art book. Rothko's consistency over forty years as a handler of paint, a conjure-upper of hazy, glazed, elusive colour mists, and an organiser of subtle forms, makes a powerful impression.
Mark Rothko, 'Black on Maroon', 1959
Copyright 1999 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the late 1940s he starts coming up with the recognisable Rothko look: largely vertical banks of fuzzy -edged abstract shapes, with no lingering figures or signs, and none of the elegant graphic flourishes that make his earlier work charming and skilful. The late 1940s pictures (after a certain point everything is "Untitled") are impressive because of the way they make very little seem rich. Dabs and patches of thin colour - oil paint thinned with turpentine, applied over grounds of pigment suspended in rabbit skin size -- appear to gather at points around the canvas. They don't really ever coalesce into forms but just seem to somehow divide up the space in a rather melting and evanescent way. The edges of the canvas suddenly become sensitised, as if the whole idea of the painting is to justify them, to make the physical outer limits dramatic and loaded. This format turns massive at the very end of the decade, and the classic $60m dollar look kicks in and lasts to the end of Rothko's life twenty years later. The existential void, the Freudian unconscious, the twentieth-century fear of the Bomb: Rothko's looming sombre cloudy fields, with their rich colour relationships and their dramatic glinting tonal contrasts, and their powerful and confident sense of exact proportion, stand for these old ideas. They express the aims and uncertainties of the age in which they were made. But they also stand for something difficult and rare and serious, and rather convincing, a type of art that answers only to itself and makes sense on its own, and doesn't need heavy breathing explanations or justifications.
Matthew Collings
Matthew Collings is an artist and writer who lives in London. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw School in the 1970s and at Goldsmith's in the early 1990s. He has written several books including 'Blimey!' and 'This Is Modern Art'. He has written and presented many TV programmes, including the series, 'This Is Modern Art,' which received several awards including a BAFTA. His most recent series, 'This Is Civilisation,' was on Channel 4 in November 2007 and will be repeated on More4 in 2008. A book to accompany the series has been published by 21. Collaborative paintings by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs can be seen at the Fine Art Society, London, until 24 May 2008.
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