Starring Mark Rothko

MARCH 30, 2010 TAGS: ART, THEATER, PAINTERS ADD A COMMENT
Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko kept banker’s hours. Rain or shine, hot or cold, inspired or not, he went to his New York studio, Monday through Friday at 9:00 o’clock, ready to work. There, during the 1950s and 1960s, he painted large, luminous blocks of color hovering on fields of monochromatic intensity, some 20 canvases a year. In work after work, the artist with the deep voice and the scar on his nose (he said it had been inflicted by a Cossack’s whip) used his everyday discipline to find ways to capture nothing less than “the human drama.”
A tad old-fashioned, he ground pigments with a mortar and pestle to create his own paints. Before he could afford assistants, he made his own wooden supports and stretched canvases to fit them. Mostly, he sat and stared at his non-figurative art, trying to decide whether it was finished or needed additional work.

A Russian émigré, Rothko was obsessed by the plight of humanity. While most people who looked at his art saw blues and greens, tangerine orange and saffron yellow, crimson and jet black, he felt he’d encapsulated “the artist’s eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions.”

Underscoring this notion, Rothko believed, “The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees.”

When he committed suicide 40 years ago at 66, Rothko was upset that Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein had usurped his stature in the art world. But Rothko is on top once again. Almost three years ago, a painting from 1950 that banker David Rockefeller owned fetched $72.8 million at Sotheby’s. A United States postage stamp commemorates the painter with a 1956 work imprinted on it. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is showing six Black paintings from 1964, coupled with early and middle-period work from the 1930s and ’40s, on view until Jan. 2, 2011. Rothko’s Seagram Murals of 1958-59 were just on display at the Tate Liverpool for several months; and, in a few weeks, a selection of his paintings opens at Moscow’s The Garage Center for Contemporary Art.

And now there’s Red, on Broadway after a sold-out run at London’s Donmar Warehouse and a serious candidate for a Pulitzer Prize and multiple Tonys. There has rarely been a more serious, better-written, wonderfully performed production about what it means to be an artist. Alfred Molina stars as Rothko, and Eddie Redmayne has already won an Olivier Award in his role as the artist’s studio assistant.

The youngest of four children, Marcus Rothkowitz was born in Dvinsk, a town between St. Petersburg and Warsaw, on Sept. 26, 1903. His father, a pharmacist, died shortly after brining his wife and 10-year-old son to Portland, Oregon, late in 1913. A bright young boy, Rothko — he would not legally change his name until 1959 — was on track to become a Talmudic scholar, but he quit and later entered Yale on a scholarship in 1921, at a time when few Jews attended Ivy League colleges.
Prone to exaggeration, Rothko later claimed he wandered into an art class and immediately realized he wanted to become a painter. After his sophomore year, he left Yale for New York and in January 1924 enrolled at the Art Students League. Briefly, he returned to Portland and studied acting. Back in NYC, he continued classes at the League and secured odd jobs, including one teaching art to children at a Jewish center in Brooklyn. In 1932, he met Edith Sachar, a sculptor, and married her a few months later. Rothko was painting awkward, clumsy-looking figures at the time, which ironically resemble art now found in Chelsea galleries. He must have had enormous inner strength that allowed him to persevere in a career where he was neither making money nor meeting with much critical success. But it was the Depression, and all his friends were in the same situation.

As the 1930s turned into the ’40s and America entered World War II, Rothko’s art entered a new phase. His gawky images metamorphosed into squat, winged, hybrid creatures that he related to aspects of Greek mythology. With two other future Abstract Expressionist pioneers, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, Rothko wrote a manifesto-like letter to the New York Times, in which, the three averred, “only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

When he wasn’t working in watercolor, the artist, now married a second time to Mary Alice “Mell” Beistle, an illustrator, thinned his oils so much, his paintings resembled watercolors. In 1947, Rothko, who admired Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, wrote, “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are performers.” He wanted this “group of actors … to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.”

A New Yorker cartoonist once famously drew a sunset in the form of classic Rothko rectangles. But what Rothko achieved with his mature paintings was far more complicated. His color interactions allowed the large rectangles to seem to float forwards or recede backwards in space, depending on where a viewer stood.

When he exhibited his large canvases, he hung them close together and low to the floor so that they would create self-sufficient environments. Rothko once compared small paintings executed since the Renaissance to “novels” and suggested that “large pictures,” such as the ones he executed, “are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.” When he found observers weeping in front of them, he would deem his works successful.
As Rothko got older, his paintings got darker, and he talked more about death. In an art school lecture in 1958, he declared the most important component of a work of art: “There must be a clear preoccupation with death — intimations of mortality…”

Accounts of Rothko’s life stress his melancholic nature, his alcoholism, his smoking, his trouble sleeping. But over the next few months, Red will reveal to a wider public the nature of Rothko’s complexities. The painter who wanted his art to express high drama now has his life transformed into grand theater.

Phyllis Tuchman, who writes about art and artists for Obit, was an interviewer for the Mark Rothko Oral History. Several of the transcripts are now available online.