Rothko in MOMA

(on abstract art and its unfettered beauty)

May 18, 2025

I love abstract art.

Friends ask "why?" And I say "Because what's undefined is unreined."

It is a privilege to encounter art which renders me free to react, to feel both abandoned and found at the same time, to make it a part of my world in ways which are my own.

I still remember years back, Tanu and I had stood in front of a large Laxman Shrestha (who was a master of swirl and swag), in Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. We stood silently letting the colours seep into us. Soon enough I had tears in my eyes. I was embarrassed, tried to hide them, and then found she was crying too.

Art affects us, deeply, often as a wound, and when we spend time with it, we cannot emerge unaffected. Great artists make their paintings quiver and vibrate, offering a sense of atmospheric depth, which can move us to tears.

Rothko is a favourite. And luckily, almost wherever I go in the Western world, there is a new unexplored painting of his to view. And I found a whole new gallery of his work in MOMA a couple of months back when in New York.

Rothko once said "There is no such thing as good painting about nothing." And he wanted viewers to look at his paintings up close, to become enveloped in their compositions and immersed in the emotions they express.

So -

I sat in the middle of the gallery in MOMA, viewing each painting separately, silently, just letting my feelings cascade all over me.

This is what I saw. This is what I felt.

Grey approaching black, even though bordered by white, can only be messaging of impending doom. But there is white, so there is hope, there is the tendril of life and light. The present always determines the trajectory of our feelings - and yesterday's colours start to fade, till nothing but what we have distilled for ourselves stays. And that could be black, white or grey.

We bring the colours we wish to in our lives. It can be a splattering, a swish, a stroke or a whole canvas. Often we are not able to determine the shade of our happiness or state, and keep swinging in mood from joy to despair to boredom, and back. Is it uncertainty or is it the way of all joy - not wanting to be defined, lest we become used to it?

Here, for once, Rothko is a child, reveling in the passing brightness of the day. A day well lived is also a life being lived well. Only, so very often, do we forget this.

We are so many emotions at the same time. Equally we are so many people at the same time. We hold our contradictions close to our hearts. Because we are not just one of them or the other - we are an imperfect amalgam of everything. Where will we end? Maybe in those blues, or maybe in the resplendent sunshine of that yellow, or if our end is tragic - in the crushing boredom of the greys. With Rothko, all possibilities are always there.

Why do I love this painting so much? Is it that it has the most familiar colours but in the most unusual shades? Like an ordinary life which, just by being, cannot be construed as being anything less than extraordinary. There are secrets embedded in this painting. Things to be unravelled. They could well be the painter's. But because all art finally belongs to the viewers, Rothko's secrets are ours too. But much more important than our secrets is what we become because of them. In that one revelation lies the answer to the mystery of what we are and what we become.

We do not and cannot live in singularities. We are layered, complex, conflicted. Conjoined with the brightest of times, we have the deepest of sorrows. The darkest of times is streaked with redemption. Nothing is final. Everything passes. And sometimes we are many things all at the same time. Rothko is both happy and not happy, he is merely being a human. Encountering joy whilst wallowing in sorrow, finding rays of light even as he is possibly contemplating death. And thus we live multiple lives but also die a hundred times. We are richer because we are complex. We are gorgeous because we cannot ever possibly be simple.

Life is a race. And we carry our destinies along with us. Storms or stillness, fixed or fixated, passing or passage - we are all a part of life's trajectories. Even as we wish to simplify life's ambitions, it finds its own kind and its own beating heart. Even as we keep moving, it finds its way to entertain, entrench, or entrance us. In life, there is nothing which can be wished for and not obtained - or not wished for but still got.

What do you think of these paintings? Do they make you pause and think and wonder and feel? Do let me know in the comments below!

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