. Discuss the relationship between colour and space in the writings and paintings of Rothko.
“The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their colour relationships then you miss the point.” – Mark Rothko
There is no quote but the one I have mentioned above that really and truly culminates the message that Rothko (figure 1) wanted to communicate. Rothko forms part of the movement today coined the Abstract Expressionism, or which also became known as the New York School. This is a period in American art when the debt to European art is overcome and this new vivacious spirit takes over, emerging from Paris and New York. This movement took place after World War II. When studying the works and writings of an artist, one must keep into consideration the political background of the artist where there is a sense of tragedy, the writings which were taking place at that period of time and also in Rothko’s case as in his contemporaries like Newman and Reinhardt the religious background. Judaism will play a big part in Rothko’s works, which are ultimately there to bring out emotion.
This school focused on two separate directions: one being that of gesture, which was brought out by artists such as Jackson Pollock (famous for his drip paintings) in his work Shimmering Substance (figure 2). Where the canvas is charged with movement, which emanates from the boundless energy of the brushwork. The other was the celebrated floating fields of colour brought out by Rothko in works such as Untitled (1954) (figure 3) and Orange, Red and Red (1962). (figure 4) The flat areas of colour of Rothko and Newman replaced the impasto and line of Pollock. Newman explains this by saying, ‘instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting off spaces, my drawings declare the space. ’ Colour was one of the main concerns in the mid-twentieth century. The works of Kandinsky and Mondrian, who was a wartime refugee present in New York when American art assumed international status, influenced these abstract expressionists. His final insistence in colour seems to have been a response to the works of Rothko, Newman and Reinhardt. This idea of working with colour in space, but still the works remain fundamentally objects of contemplation and meditation. Rothko, Newman and Reinhardt reacted to art as a heroic religious act. European modernism had shocked in the American public in its arrival in around 1913, when they were seeing works of Duchamp and Picabia, but this also made them realise that they had something missing, it made them start the search for this new art, one which as Rothko rightly said, would communicate with basic human emotions.
Mark Rothko was born in Russia and was an American painter. Although he is labelled an abstract expressionist, he rejected this label as he rejected the idea of his works being ‘abstractions’. He said, ‘I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. ’ Rothko and his contemporaries come from a period after the war, which was filled with tragedies that seemed to be a continuing part of modern life. The war led to psychological introspection amongst many artists, just as the Great Depression had led to cultural introspection in the 1930s. He committed suicide at the age of sixty-six and was not the only artist to do so, Arshile Gorky and Frida Kahlo are other examples of artists committing suicide. Pollock who in his early works like his contemporary Mark Rothko had started depicting myth. This was probably partly due to the writings and beliefs of Pollock’s friend, John Graham. Who in his book of Systems of Dialectics of Art speaks of how the artists should ‘reestablish a lost contact with the unconscious (actively by producing works of art and passively by contemplating works of art) with the primordial racial … in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind’. He uses this idea when he writes his article on ‘Primitive Art and Picasso’ in 1937. Graham believes that primitive art is powerful because of the spontaneity of the design and the composition thus triggering the unconscious mind. Pollock, Rothko, and their contemporaries knew wanted their work to awaken the crouching ancestor in their viewers’ heads. Barnett Newman, a contemporary of Pollock and Rothko, who had not done any significant works till the 1940s but was a propagandist for this mythical art that his contemporaries were creating, as he believed that only with going back to the primitive can the being achieve his wholeness, said “original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his own tragic state, at his own self awareness, and at his own helplessness before the void.” The words “helplessness before the void” show what this style is really about, this existentialist solitude with Miltonic décor, and the artist posturing as a tragic Adam who, having lost Paradise, will not content himself with the world. Many of the American painters had a good knowledge of the writings of Freud and Jung, this shows that they were not only mimicking Surrealists. The Birth of a Tragedy by Nietzsche also influenced Rothko in his works. This work was about the redemption of man from the life he leads on earth. Rothko wanted to show the spiritual emptiness, which could only be fulfilled by mythology. Abstract expressionism had far less contact with everyday life than Surrealism. Saying this, it was the presence of Andre Masson (a surrealist) that had a great influence on the American painters because he had worked on bringing together the fantasies of the urban world, the modern man and the old dark imagery of prehistory. In 1943, Mark Rothko declared his belief that “the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless”. This meant he was appealing to the kind of archetypal imagery that Masson’s massacres, labyrinths, and totems had evoked for the past fifteen years.

Modernism seems to be a cluster of philosophical theories put together to understand the works of art, this idea of art for art’s sake, the idea that art is made for no social purpose, and that it should be judged in its own terms. We have different theories verging from those of Clement Greenberg to the far-fetched theories of Hilla Rebay. Clement Greenberg believed that art should develop in an almost ‘scientific’ and ‘clinical’ way: modern paintings should examine themselves as material forms and procedures, not produce images of the world, but refer to themselves as unique and irreducible forms of material, cultural and cognitive creation. Greenberg’s ‘technical’, almost puritanical disregard for pleasure as a necessary component for this critical activity also debarred any fanciful concern for the metaphysical or spiritual dimension of Art. Rothko becomes the great layerer of paint and in his works he brings out his Jewish heritage, Greenberg fails to realise that this is what Rothko tries to achieve. Rothko begins to depict a sort of pictorial realism in his figurative works, an example of this is his work subway (figure 5). He than realises that figures can not serve his needs as an artist, and says “ it was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes…but a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it” and moves to a more abstract art. Rothko’s abstract works will take us on a journey into the mystical and the transcendental. Even in Mark Rothko as a person there is something of the mystical, he seems fidgety and unconfident. Observe figure 1, which is his self- portrait, he holds his hands in a fidgety manner and he seems to fade in the background, yet the red on his lips makes him stick out, like a child hiding in a corner yet dressed as a peacock.
Scale was an extremely important aspect in the works of the abstract expressionists. In 1948, Clement Greenberg spoke about this persistence to have large canvases to seem to go beyond the canvas, offering the idea of the transcendental. The scale of the work can make the work personal or impersonal to the beholder. In 1951, Rothko argued ‘ to paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command. Rothko wanted his work to communicate with the basic emotions so for him it would make perfect sense to have large works so the beholder can enter the work and as the walls take up the walls of the museum the viewer is immersed in the bewildering fields of colour. In 1950, Rothko was commissioned to paint a set of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, but after seeing the Four Seasons Rothko felt it was not the place for his paintings. He withdrew from the commission and eventually gave the Seagram murals to the Tate Modern Gallery, which was in need of works in that period in time. When entering the Rothko room in the Tate Modern Gallery, one directly gets this idea of mysticism of the maroons and the blacks (a contrast from the brighter colours used in his earlier works) of these large paintings (figure 6) and some may feel like entering the room is like entering a chapel with its quietness and coolness. Some feel more alert when looking at the works of Rothko; others may feel their stomach muscles tighten. This is what Mark Rothko wants to achieve, “Since my pictures are large, colourful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative .” Rothko travelled in Europe to Florence, Rome, Venice and Pompeii. These works were influenced by his trip to Florence where he came across the Laurentian library of Michelangelo , where he uses a sort of blind arcading, niche like structure, but with nothing inside. These fascinated Rothko and he used them in these works because the niche structure gave the work a sort of infinity. When sitting and observing the paintings in the room the red pigment used seems to harp back to the red used in the villas in Pompeii. Rothko’s work differentiated from that of mainstream Paris especially work of Picasso (as it lacked ‘any deep or esoteric philosophy’) , as he thought that a work should be full of philosophical thought.
Rothko was a great Jewish artist and he wished to bring out the element of mysticism that comes with the religion of Judaism. The element of the profound that can be found in religion is an ideal vessel for Rothko to communicate basic human emotions and also as a vessel of contemplation. He makes use of the reference of the veil by Josephus , by giving his works a sort of veil like impression. Josephus describes the Virgin as wearing the veil of the temple, and her body is to be the weave that will weave the body of the child of the Almighty. Jesus becomes the veil of the temple that hides the torah and the sacrament. ‘Thou shall make a veil of purple and blue’; Josephus records this veil, as he sees it with his own eyes. This idea of incorporating the religious into their work can be seen in Newman who depicted the stages of the cross with single vertical lines on a plain background. This can also be seen in Reinhardt who studied oriental art and philosophy; he creates dark paintings, which are symbolic to the cross.
Endlessly, the spirituality reaches its climax, with the Rothko chapel (figure 7), a place filled with his mural canvases, a place which welcomes people from all over the world, to contemplate and pray surrounded by these works. This chapel is featured in the National Geographic as one of the most peaceful and powerful places to visit. Throughout his life, Rothko fought for his work to have a deeper meaning, to communicate human emotion and he has achieved it splendidly.