Rothko the writer
If any painter aimed to transcend words, it was Mark Rothko, whose luminous fields of color revolutionized American art. All the more surprising, then, that his newly published writings tell us so much.
IN 1978, THE PAINTER Philip Guston warned that if artists did not speak in public, they ran the risk of being reduced to ``painting monkeys." If, on the other hand, they did speak, their words were generally not to be trusted. The only truth, according to Guston, was in their candid remarks.
His prime example was Mark Rothko. After a visit to Guston's Manhattan studio in 1957, Rothko had told him, ``Phil, you're the best storyteller around, and I'm the best organ player." Admitting that after more than 20 years the meaning of the comment was still not entirely clear-was Rothko saying that his pure tones were like the awe-inspiring chords of a church organ?-Guston nevertheless preferred it to the ``words like noble and sublime" that had been used to embalm or explain away the mesmerizing bands of color that characterize Rothko's mature work.
Of course, not all of us are lucky enough to bump into the likes of Mark Rothko at the local bar (much less exchange studio visits), so we're forced, instead, to rely on published statements and interviews to navigate an artist's thoughts. Fortunately, the public writing isn't always as misleading as Guston implies.
In Rothko's case, the voyage has only been made possible some 35 years after his suicide, with the recent publication by Yale University Press of two separate volumes-his theoretical treatise, ``The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art," and ``Writings on Art," a compilation of letters, short essays, and other documents-representing virtually all of his known writings. The iconic clarity of his late paintings always implied a strategic mind, but only now are we able to examine the written proof.
A leading painter of the generation that effectively moved the center of the art world from Europe to New York, Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903, was himself an immigrant, arriving from Russia with his family at the age of 10. By the age of 20 he had dropped out of Yale to become an artist, and less than 20 years later, he was exhibiting at major museums and galleries under the name of Mark Rothko. But it wasn't until the latter part of the decade that he would radically simplify his pictures into the radiant hues that would make that name world famous.
Like any groundbreaking thinker, Rothko had his contradictions, and over the decades we see him turn in his writing from an aspiring young artist who in 1935 organized a group of expressionist painters, The Ten, to an established painter who, in 1958, repudiated both art movements in general and expressionism in particular by declaring himself an ``antiexpressionist." In this sense, Rothko's written work neatly parallels his paintings, which similarly matured from derivative mythological illustrations to bold and evocative arrangements of pure pigment.
Likewise, the young painter who finds release in color turns into the established figure who, by 1953, has to fend off the specter of formalism-that cold idea that art should be concerned exclusively with itself-by famously saying, ``I am not interested in color." Again, the writing seems to be in synch with the paintings, which also changed from the striking pictures of the early `50s to the more somber blacks, browns, and purples that dominated the paintings he completed shortly before his death in 1970.
Throughout, Rothko shows not only that he is good with words, but that they were important enough to him to justify, at least occasionally, ``this wrestling match with the typewriter." Yet Rothko assigned writing a decidedly secondary role, always aware of its power to interfere with the viewer's direct experience of art. His writings are therefore best understood as a part of the more important wrestling match that took place with the paintings.
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Although it had enjoyed a long life in the mythology surrounding Rothko, the actual manuscript for ``The Artist's Reality" had spent almost 50 years hidden in a manilla folder, labeled ``miscellaneous papers," before being accidentally discovered by the estate's bookkeeper in 1988. Not wanting to spoil the ``sensuous adventure" of his father's art with second-rate writing, Christopher Rothko then held on to the many scraps and drafts for 15 years before deciding to edit them into an intelligible (and intelligent) book.
In 1941, poised between his surrealist experiments of the 1930s and the unforgettably simplified luminosity that would emerge eight years later, Rothko took a year off to write. All the anecdotal evidence suggests that he approached the task very seriously, and these publications show he did it very well. While most of the ideas in the book are not original to him, it is still exciting to follow along as one of our best painters addresses the big problems of the era, with chapters on Primitive Art, Modern Art, Beauty, and Decadence. If he sometimes loses himself in a pile of abstractions, Rothko usually finds his way back to basic concepts, and the journey goes more smoothly if one keeps his future paintings in mind while reading. His detailed inquiries into the role of light in painting are a bit technical, but less so if one remembers how nice it is to bask in the light that his iconic works effortlessly emit.
If ``The Artist's Reality" gives us Rothko the theorist, ``Writings on Art" aims at a fuller picture. The 90 or so chronological entries start in 1934 with his enthusiastic conviction that ``painting is just as natural a language as singing or speaking" and end, in 1969, with a very short speech marking the ``difficult" acceptance of an honorary doctorate from his abandoned alma mater, Yale. (Having finally achieved fame, Rothko tells his audience, with overtones of his impending suicide, that he longs, instead, for ``pockets of silence.")
In between, we find a public figure sensitive to published descriptions of his work and fiercely eloquent in his rebuttals. After having told The
Rothko was a tireless editor of his own writing, and even his well honed public statements maintained a disarming generosity. ``I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is something very grandiose and pompous," he wrote in a 1951 MoMA symposium under the heady title ``How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture." ``The reason I paint them however-I think it applies to other painters I know-is precisely because I want to be intimate and human." Reading this, one notices that most of Rothko's later pictures are about the size of a person with outstretched arms. Compared with an Impressionist canvas, they can feel huge, but their ambitious scale is still decidedly human. And like the laconic man who painted them, the paintings seem to hover on the verge of some confession.
This tension between restraint and intimacy continues in Rothko's correspondence. The most revealing is with Katharine Kuh, a curator organizing a show of his at the Art Institute of Chicago. Rothko tries repeatedly to articulate what should and should not be said about his art, changing his mind continually about how best to accompany his paintings with words. First, he wants to publish their correspondence, then he realizes a simple statement would be better, and finally he wants to fly in and give a lecture. But that would disrupt his work schedule. Eventually, he decides to do nothing at all, not having, he tells Kuh, ``the stomach for the role of apologist."
Rothko's nervous oscillations about writing and speaking are both endearing and revealing, but his fussing over the physical details of the exhibit are more so. He is particular about the lighting (``normal light-that's how they were painted"), the display height (``as close to the ground as possible"), and even the color of the gallery walls (``considerably off-white with umber and warmed by a little red"). He wants, he writes, to create an intimate-rather than institutional-encounter, and therefore also needs to arrange the paintings so they are first encountered at close range.
It is this kind of writing that best serves his art. For those of us who feel ``close" to Rothko's pictures, such comments may help us understand the mechanics of our feelings. Those who find his work inscrutable might discover a hospitable point of entry in the realization that Rothko desperately wanted to communicate, not intimidate.
For all that these writings reveal about Rothko the artist, however, they shed little light on Rothko the man. There are no love letters-no letters to family at all-and the worst mystery of Rothko's life, his suicide in his studio, wasn't accompanied by a note, which may be fitting. As a painter, Rothko always preferred the evocative to the explicit, and his best pictures show us that he was right. His writing, too, is carefully crafted so as to occasionally state his values without interfering with the hermetic strength of his paintings. Or as he himself put it, ``There is more power in telling little than in telling all."
Dushko Petrovich, a painter living in Cambridge, is the art critic for the journal n+1. 