MARK ROTHKO: THE ARTIST’S REALITY
A podcast dated 29th July
2014 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is entitled The
Artist’s Reality – Philosophies of Art.
A manuscript by Mark Rothko that was
probably written in 1940-41 was discovered and then published in 2005. The manuscript is entitled The Artist’s
Reality.
The
podcast by the National Gallery of Art is a recording of a lecture dated 11th
June 2005 given at the National Gallery of Art by Christopher Rothko – the son
of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970): http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/audio/reality-rothko.html
This
is a brief summary of the podcast.
Christopher Rothko had originally
sought not to edit his father’s philosophical work, but he did eventually
become the editor: he describes the chaotic text produced by his father’s
‘dyspeptic typewriter’. But Christopher
found himself seduced and drawn in by his father’s manuscript: his sister Kate
urged him to take on the task and so ‘his fate was sealed’.
The
paintings
Christopher Rothko assumes his
audience is familiar with his father’s work and has a substantial interest in
it. He shows and describes one of his
father’s 1954 paintings as ‘ethereal and coaxingly elusive’. Another work of the same year is described as
‘especially harmonious and balanced, both in its composition and in the feeling
that it exudes’. A work from 1963 is
described as ‘challenging - even defiant with its bright red against the more
sombre blacks and browns’.
Christopher Rothko shows and
describes a portrait by his father of his mother – believed to be his first
painting on canvas, a painting by his father from 1935 of the New York subway,
and a portrait by him of 1939 which is one his last works done in a figurative
style.
Continuity
Christopher then sets out his
purpose which is to show the continuity from his father’s figurative works to his
abstract works. He looks for ‘formal and
compositional similarities’. In his
father’s earlier works he notes the dominance of the background over the
foreground, the squaring off of the elements of the painting and the way in
which the composition is brought forward to the frontal plane and in which it is
broken into horizontal planes. This is
described as ‘ambiguity of space’. He
also shows continuity in his father’s ‘hazy, soft edges’. And continuity is also shown in the use of
colour: in ‘Rothko’s vibrant palette’.
The philosophies put forward by
Rothko in The Artist’s Reality are argued to be viable as a means of
showing the continuity between the artist’s earlier figurative and later abstract
works. The Artist’s Reality is
described as ‘sloppily written, not terribly long, never finished and written
ten years before Rothko became a well-known artist’, but it tells us a lot
about the work he would produce.
Rothko’s
change in style whilst the manuscript was being written
Whilst the manuscript was being
written, Rothko was working as an art teacher.
During this time – late 1930s to 1941 – Rothko’s style changed from
figurative to a figurative surrealist approach and then a more abstract surrealist
style in 1942. (Later in the lecture this
more abstract surrealist style is said to be represented by his 1945 work Rites of Lilith).
The ‘multiforms’ started in 1946:
these are pure abstraction with colour at the fore, but the forms have not yet
coalesced into the familiar rectangles. Rothko’s
classic style, known as ‘sectional’ or ‘colour field’ began in 1949.
We don’t know exactly when Rothko’s
manuscript was written within the period of change from figurative painting to
surrealism, and the process of writing would appear to have been integral with
the changes of style. It must be
emphasised that the manuscript was written nearly ten years before the
emergence of the abstract style for which Rothko is now best-known: we may ask
whether the The Artist’s Reality may really have any applications to the
paintings that are Rothko’s ‘signature style’ but Christopher Rothko asserts
that the text is often ‘uncannily prophetic’ of the changes that are to come.
What
does Rothko mean by abstraction?
The first quote that is given from The
Artist’s Reality concerns Rothko’s views on abstraction. It suggests that at the time of writing
(1940?) Rothko has already disavowed figurative painting, though he is not at
that time painting in an abstract style.
So what does Rothko mean by abstraction?
Our lecturer argues that in Rothko's
figurative style he paints ‘ideas of people’ and ‘human situations’ but with
‘little regard for visual reality’. Rothko’s
surrealist style is shown to portray figures in such a way that their purpose
is primarily symbolic. To show the
strength of Rothko’s move towards abstraction our lecturer resorts to a maths
lesson given by his father in The Artist’s Reality. Using the method of an algebraic formula,
Rothko asserts that the substitution of any symbol in a formula by a real
object would ‘remove the whole relationship from the sphere of generality and
place it into the particular’. Real
objects introduce qualities that would ‘confuse the absoluteness of our
equations’. Although Rothko had in mind
Greek myths, the main point is about symbols: ‘the power of the general
compared with the specific; the abstract compared with the concrete’.
Thus art is not about the depiction
of a particular scene but about the expression of an idea: the most powerful
expression of an idea is an abstract one because it is not limited by time or
culture.
Using
appearance to demonstrate the reality of the world of ideas
A second quote makes clear Rothko’s
espousal of abstraction. He writes that
abstract painters are the ‘objectivists’ of our age who use appearance to
demonstrate the reality of the world of ideas.
Both kinds of artists are objectivists who are concerned with the world
of appearances, ‘but one subjects ideas to appearance, and the other
appearances to the world of ideas’.
Rothko is not interested in showing
us how things really look: he’s interested in showing how things look to
express an idea.
A
‘quasi-scientific stripping away’
Rothko further writes that whilst all
art actively engages with all the ideas in the contemporary environment, ‘modern
art’ is of the age ‘that is preoccupied with the dissection of matter to arrive
at the basis of its structural life, where all perceptible phenomena are being
dissolved into their abstract components: art can do nothing else but to follow
the same course in relation to the laws of art’. Christopher Rothko argues that his father’s
styles of figurative, surreal and abstract painting all show his desire to work
only with line, form and colour – on a path that successively rejects line and
form. Christopher Rothko describes this
as a ‘quasi-scientific stripping away’ that ultimately in the sectional style leaves
only the action of brush and colour as the players that communicate with
us’.
All these goals are set out in
1940/41 in The Artist’s Reality, and Rothko worked towards these goals
over the next 30 years.
Rothko
was critical of modern art for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement
But in his treatise Rothko also
recognised that mere stripping down would result in emptiness. Unlike the scientist, the artist cannot have
separate truths, separate unities and separate fragments of the universe: the
artist must ‘always resolve his fragments in man’s subjectivity’. Rothko expresses his distress at the ‘atomisation’
that is prevalent about him: artificial separation and lack of
inter-communication.
Rothko asks ‘where in this does
man’s experience lie?’ and suggests that the artist, like the philosopher and
the poet, needs to resolve all the various laws and systems into one picture
or, as Rothko put it, ‘a unity’. He sees
that the human element is missing: that human subjective experience must
somehow be satisfied in a modern atomised world. Rothko looks to communicate directly with our
subjective world.
Rothko then looks back to Leonardo de
Vinci and the Venetian Renaissance painters.
He celebrates Leonardo’s ‘subjective quality of light’. This lets the artist engage with
‘emotionality’, thus introducing humanity into the painting. ‘It relates the representation of the individual
emotionality in the terms of the universal emotions’. The work of Rembrandt was the major inspiration
for Rothko in this respect.
Rothko was critical of modern art
for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement: surrealism was cynical –
tearing apart and not repairing. For
Rothko, light is a binding agent – the ‘instrument of the new unity’, and for
Rothko it is colour that conveys and expresses light and emotionality.
The
expressive possibilities of colour
In The Artist’s Reality Rothko
laments the detrimental effect of linear perspective on the representation of colour. The recession of colour through various
intervals of grey had been the artist’s primary concern: background colours are
necessarily muted. Following Matisse who
maintains the same intensity of colour throughout a painting, Rothko used colour to move activity in his sectional
paintings to the frontal plane.
Throughout his various style changes
Rothko explored the expressive possibilities of colour. In his sectional works colour is shown to
have intrinsic qualities of suggesting recession and advancement. Juxtaposition of colours stimulates movement,
achieving ambiguity of space, depth and superimposition.
In his sectional paintings Rothko is
both stripping away cultural and artistic clutter to get to the essential
elements and achieving a sensual communication of human emotion.
Abstract
Expressionism
Christopher Rothko states that he
has come to a new appreciation of the term Abstract Expressionism. Rothko rejected the term but his son
considers it an accurate description of his father’s works.
In
a question and answer session with the lecturer these subjects are included:
It’s not clear who were the
philosophers who most influenced Rothko, but it’s most likely that these would
have included: Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy in particular); Kierkegaard; and Classical
philosophers and poets.
Rothko’s interest and abilities in
mathematics and science. Contemporary
physics and the social sciences are mentioned in The Artist’s Reality.
Rothko’s collaboration with Barnett
Newman and the extent to which there may have been a shared spiritual
interest.
Rothko would not have regarded himself,
or his works, as ‘spiritual’, but he would probably have used the terms ‘the
human spirit’ or ‘universal spirit’.
Rothko’s career as an art teacher of
young children.
Rothko’s methods of preparation of
his canvasses and the constituent elements of his paint.
The podcast was a post on Facebook
on 5th August 2014 by the Mark Rothko Facebook group that was a re-posting
of a re-post by Artas Artacdemysilva of
Riga.
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