Seeking the spiritual in the abstract
(the art and times of Mark Rothko)
In my poem "On breaking up without breaking", I had made references to a whole lot of my favorites. Cohen, Timberlake, Heather Nova, MoMA. As also to one of my all-time favorite artists - Rothko.
I clearly remember, to the day, in 2017, when I was standing in front of a massive painting – Four Darks in Reds – in the Rothko gallery in the Whitney Art Gallery, in the meat packing district in New York.
As I stood in front of the Rothko squares with the colours almost floating into each other, I could feel tears welling into my eyes. There were no figures, no stories, nothing but squares and colours, and I was feeling a strange emotional upheaval which even I could not understand.
Strangely - maybe eerily - Rothko anticipated this. He’d said “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
People have often asked me what the meaning of abstract art is, particularly an abstract expressionist artist like Rothko.
And I have told them - as I have told many others who ask me the question of how to view art - that you just have to stand in front of a painting and let its colours and form and feeling engulf you. It is very close to Tolstoy’s notion of “emotional infectiousness”, a term which I completely understand and almost own!
The important thing to realize is that artists often resort to abstract art, when the intensity of their feelings is so acute that other forms of art are just not enough to contain the enormity of what they are feeling.
Rothko’s squares are legendary, and he anticipated that they will result in tumult inside his viewers. He said that the feeling that he put into his paintings was bound to come out of his canvases and affect the true aficionado.
Rothko wrote the following of how his work - or, in fact, any work of art - should be experienced -
"....the artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. The spectator must move with the artist’s shapes in and out, under and above, diagonally and horizontally; he must curve around spheres, pass through tunnels, glide down inclines, at times perform an aerial feat of flying from point to point, attracted by some irresistible magnet across space, entering into mysterious recesses — and, if the painting is felicitous, do so at varying and related intervals. This journey is the skeleton, the framework of the idea. In itself it must be sufficiently interesting, robust, and invigorating. That the artist will have the spectator pause at certain points and will regale him with especial seductions at others is an additional factor helping to maintain interest. In fact, the journey might not be undertaken at all were it not for the promise of these especial favors… It is these movements that constitute the special essentialness of the plastic experience. Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture."
Intrigued enough to more about Rothko?
Kate Land writes about Rothko in her wonderful blog mdmommusings :
“Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was an intelligent and philosophically inclined man who won a scholarship to Yale but left New Haven after two years to join the Manhattan art scene (he was later awarded a degree from Yale). There he began his art education with classes in representational drawing and painting. Ultimately however, he became known for abstract painting and would be placed in the group of artists working in the 1950’s called the Abstract Expressionists. Rothko filled huge canvases with large blocks of vibrant colors.
I paint very large pictures because I want to create a state of intimacy. A large picture is an immediate transaction. It takes you into it.
His technique was novel and refined; he painstakingly applied series of layers of thin washes of colors that added up to creating a luminescence and a remarkable shimmering effect.
Rothko disliked giving up these masterpieces of scale and light and color.
It’s a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!
In an attempt to control the fate of his canvases he became famous for exerting control over how they were displayed. They were to be hung so that there was little white wall surrounding them; preferably in a room with only other paintings of his. The paintings were to be hung as low as possible and in quite dim light. He meant the paintings to be ideally viewed at a distance of only 18 inches so that the (single) viewer would be enveloped by the experience as Rothko had been enveloped while painting them (he wanted to create a feeling that the painting was not static but, continuing to evolve as it was viewed).
In his fabulous book The Power of Art, Simon Schama says “no other painter in the history of modern art – perhaps in the entire history of painting – was so obsessed with the relationship between the artist and his audience”.
Then followed years of struggle with alcohol and creation of paintings of an progressively dark palette. These somber paintings seem to represent a final step down into a darkening of spirit. His health failed, his marriage failed and he continued to drink and smoke. He became increasingly depressed.
On February 25th, 1970 Mark Rothko was found dead in his studio, his wrists slit.”
Jonathon Jones wrote in a blog post for the Guardian that “Rothko was fascinated by the idea of shaping a room with art, using abstract painting as a type of architecture”. He meant to create a physical space where his canvases could work with the surrounding architecture to move viewers to meditate. He meant to induce a religious experience.
Upon his death he had created just this.
Rothko's work is an unforgettable journey. And like all great art, it is a bridge across ages and lifetimes, the very definition of something not only immortal, but that which wrought change without intimation, as a whisper.
Making tears flow, as if from nowhere.
More on art!!
Read my previous articles on the disturbing art of Ugur Gallenkus, the art I found in the gorgeous Whitney museum, and my hagiography (!!!) on Monet.
Thanks for this. My experience of that very same Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Whitney was very similar, which, for me, was surprising, as I'd had very little knowledge of those works prior to that day. It's very nice to remember.