The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas.
So wrote Mark Rothko, in a manuscript that he worked on in the early 1940s, while he took a break from painting. At that time his pictures were figurative, later he experimented for a few years with a form of surrealism, before developing the large abstract colour paintings for which he became famous. He is an artist whose work we tend to discover in reverse chronological order: the late works are the most familiar, and the transitional experiments in surrealism and abstraction are somewhat better known that his figurative work. Despite these radical changes in form and scale, his work pursues a consistent theme, namely his determination to draw our attention to the sorrow and suffering that is central to our experience of life. Rothko’s abandonment of figuration midway through his career, was not an abandonment of interest in the human, rather it was his attempt to depict the full range of human experience, and especially our experiences of unhappiness, more convincingly.
Rothko’s manuscript, The Artist’s Reality, was published in 2004, more than thirty years after his death by suicide. Like Paul Gaugin’s Recontars de Rapin, written in 1903 but not published until 1951, Rothko’s attack on contemporary art criticism is heartfelt and persuasive, but his ability to explain in words the meaning and importance of his art is less convincing. Gauguin and Rothko were both great painters, but neither were great writers. Nonetheless, their texts do tell us something about the questions that concerned them, the problems that they tried to address, the ideas that motivated them. Knowing this helps us better to understand their most compelling paintings.
Back in March, I travelled to Paris to visit a major retrospective exhibition of Rothko’s work, held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The FLV building, designed by Frank Gehry and situated in the Bois de Boulogne, is a spectacular addition of new gallery space in Paris. Together with the Fondation Cartier and the Centre Pompidou, the city now has three wonderful modern buildings, all less than fifty years old, in which to view the very best contemporary art in a non-commercial setting. There is nothing comparable in London. And, this Rothko exhibition needed those large spaces: over one hundred paintings, including a room devoted to the figurative work, another for the surrealist work, a room for the early, transitional abstract work, and then a series of rooms for the larger, fully abstract, blocks of painted colour, including a reconstruction of the Rothko Room from the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, a room containing the nine Seagram murals that belong to the Tate in London, and a room containing eleven of the late black and grey paintings (shown alongside several major Giacometti sculptures). It was as close to a comprehensive survey as one could hope for, and I spent three happy hours journeying within the realm of these precious canvases.
It was not just the quantity of works that made this exhibition so special, but their consistent quality. As Rothko increasingly dispensed with form and line, he developed the ability to create the illusion of depth through his application of pure colour. In some works the sense of space emerges from the layering of colours, in others from the visible tension at the borders of contrasting colours, and in others from the insinuation of a horizon line. In all cases it is the colour that attracts and detains the attention. The scale of the canvases — many of which are more than four square meters in size — combined with the restraint of the palette range — with only two or three dominant colours in most paintings — allows the viewer to explore with leisure. There are few distractions for the eye, neither signposts to follow, nor symbols to decode: simply colour. Sometimes the colours attract the viewer’s gaze and sometimes they resist it; sometimes they induce calm and sometimes anxiety; always they seem provisional, insubstantial, temporary: as if, like clouds or plumes of smoke, they might drift away when the wind strengthens.
Rothko’s work is often described as meditative, and in some of the rooms at the FLV the low level of lighting was suggestive of a mood of spiritual observance. To my mind, this is the wrong analogy with religious art. I find his work more akin to the devotional works of the Renaissance period. He does not invite his viewers to empty from their minds the problems of the world and to find peace in quiet contemplation. Rather, he insists that we acknowledge the realities of our world, that we take notice of suffering and sorrow, and that we attend to our own fears and failings. He does this not through iconography — the depiction of representational objects that carry precise religious meanings — but by creating an atmosphere of immediacy and indeterminacy, a space which we enter into to reflect on what we feel and what we know, about ourselves and our experience. We do not look at Rothko’s work and find consolation, instead we are reminded of the many imperfections around and within us. Rothko’s colour confrontations, which dominate his work, are provocations to the viewer to confront their own lives. His paintings are mirrors, in which we see reflected not the contours of the physical world but the expression of our emotional responses to the world of human meaning. His works are devotional in the sense that by looking at them carefully, they teach us how to feel appropriately about the world.
In the late 1950s, when his work had reached its mature form of abstraction, Rothko said, the whole problem in art is how to establish human values in this specific civilization. He continued, My current pictures are involved with the scale of human feelings the human drama, as much of it as I can express. His focus on human value, and the specific time and location which his work addresses, is important in understanding the residual appeal and attraction of his painting. It is made in our time, and therefore is still immediate to us, in the way that Renaissance painting no longer is. It expresses the human experience of our time, which older painting is no longer able to do. This is not to deny the continuing value of earlier art, but to insist on the difference between art that speaks to our understanding of the past — and therefore of the continuation of the human drama through time — and of art that illuminates our understanding of today, and what it means to value human life today.
In Realism, a poem written in 1995, Czeslaw Milosz celebrated the Dutch art of the golden age, at the expense of modern art. The first half of the poem reads: We are not so badly off, if we can / Admire Dutch painting. For that means / We shrug off what we have been told / For a hundred, two hundred years. Though we lost / Much of our previous confidence. Now we agree / That those trees outside the window, which probably exist, / Only pretend to greenness and treeness / And that language loses when it tries to cope / With clusters of molecules. And yet this here: / A jar, a tin plate, a half peeled lemon / Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last – and so strongly / It is hard not to believe in their lastingness. / And thus abstract art is brought to shame / Even if we do not deserve any other.
Despite my admiration for Milosz’s poetry and for Dutch still life painting, I think he is mistaken. There is not a contest between realist and abstract work for superior meaning or lastingness. Rather, there are different ways of speaking to the human condition, at different times and for different audiences. The premiss of still-life painting was that the objects displayed were transitory: these everyday items remind us of life’s enjoyment and of its passing: the food decays, the flowers wilt, the glass breaks, and the meal is over. Dutch art of the seventeenth century celebrated the physical pleasures while reminding us of physical decay. It also promoted the democratisation of taste and culture, as these small paintings were bought not by aristocrats and cardinals, but by brewers, merchants, lawyers, and local officials. Rothko’s paintings celebrate the physical joys along the passage of life in a different way, avoiding the mediating role of objects, obviating the need for the decoding of symbols. And they were made primarily for galleries and civic spaces, where they are encountered by the public together, a form of collective encounter very different from the private enjoyment of a picture in one’s own home. At its best, abstract art is not brought to shame; on the contrary, it brings us to enlightenment.
Rothko in Paris in early Spring: a flood of colour — simply colour — that speaks directly to the heart.