Mark Rothko
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Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb were together the founders, in 1935, of the group known as The Ten. Today their work has little or nothing in common, yet both are actuated by the desire to present the painting, built up wholly in terms of surfaces, as a reality that cannot be eluded. Gottlieb studied under John Sloan and Robert Henri, two of the leading representatives of American realism in the first decade of this century. After a period of expressionistic realism, Gottlieb worked out for himself an art of forms devoid of naturalistic references -- forms intended not as an equivalent of reality but as a true and actual reality in their own right. A statement of his aims, written by the artist himself, figures in the catalogue of the New Decade exhibition held in New York in 1955. "I am . . . concerned with the problem of projecting intangible and elusive images that seem to me to have meaning in terms of feeling. The important thing is to transfer the image to the canvas as it appears to me, without distortion. To modify the image would be to falsify it, therefore I must accept it as it is. My criterion is the integrity of the projection." And since these images convey an emotion, they have a significance of their own, which they would lose if they represented anything else besides those emotions.
The painting of Mark Rothko is very far removed from both action painting and abstract expressionism, which he regards as a romantic outpouring; and any such thing is foreign to his character and temperament. His robust originality, the new problems he has raised and solved, make him one of the unquestioned leaders of contemporary American painting. The subtle complexity of his color handling also differentiates him from those European tendencies which concentrate expression in the physical properties of the painter's medium. However, as Sam Hunter has noted, "it is the paradox of Rothko's paintings, as with all serious modern art, that they achieve their maximum spiritual tension at those moments when they most strongly assert their material existence." 56 Rothko arrives at the complete identification of himself and his spiritual world with the elaboration of his color surfaces, whose intensity is increased by the very freedom with which he handles them; they are never compressed or locked in a schema, but flow freely, vitally, rhythmically over his great forms. These surfaces are not color patches; they are not punctuated with signs or reduced to their organic essentiality, but are skillfully determined in a certain way, with a regular beat, which gives them a simple, sturdy architecture from which every superfluous element and movement have been eliminated, with all emotion concentrated in a uniform luminosity.
Rothko's painting is the outcome of an unremitting process of purification. Born in Russia, he came to the United States at the age of ten, later studied art and has shared in all the vicissitudes of American painting in the past few decades. Figurative to begin with, leaning frankly toward Expressionism, he then passed on to a free interpretation of certain aspects of Surrealism, which in his case acted rather as a cultural tonic than as a purely formal lesson. With Motherwell, Gottlieb and Newman, he helped to found the Subjects of the Artist School in New York, whose activities contributed to the flowering of mid-century painting in the United States. Gradually, as he got into his stride, Rothko simplified every external and every compositional element in the extreme, exploring the possibility of working out a pure luminous form. "The progression of a painter's work," he declared in 1952, "as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood." Since then he has set great store by this will to clarity and communication. His painting cannot dispense with the values of a human presence, even though it creates a kind of heraldic mythology which rules out certain human conventions like geometry, memory with its host of lingering echoes and associations, and even history when regarded as a general succession of events.
The purifying order of Rothko's art, standing as it does at the opposite pole to action painting, might tend to resolve itself into a picture space conceived entirely in terms of two-dimensional surfaces, were it not for the clean separation of one form from another, which ensures recession in depth. So that even when the artist seems to reach a constant plane of emotive reality, actually -- notwithstanding the apparent regularity of his rhythmically ordered surfaces -- he remains very far from any immutable, crystallized reality of the Neo-Plastic type. Forms are regular and well defined, but orchestrated and delimited by the gesture, deliberately marked off by the hand that lays them in, and not structuralized in a closed space. They are repeated, in the vertical plane of his large-scale pictures, but varied in their chromatic quality and in the intensity of their lighting, and susceptible to every impinging force and contact. The artist's presence in the work, in the material elaboration of form, is not instinctive ( Rothko has left automatism behind), but is pondered over and nurtured through his technical mastery of his medium, which enables him to individuate the quality of light in its most emotive dimension, corporeal but not atmospheric, not only in bright and vivid blues, reds and yellows, but in darker tones of brown and even black. Bathed in this light, forms expand to the limit the gesture imposes on them and imply even then a possible extension beyond that limit.
Nothing could be further from the reckless exuberance of abstract expressionism. The novelty of Rothko's painting in the American art world lies above all in the peculiarity of his attitude: it is possible to express anything when the definition of forms is carried to such a pitch of pristine clarity and purity. From vitality of texture, the artist passed on to vitality of form, reasserting its structural and emotive validity, re-exploring the innermost veins of emotional expression, and re-establishing contact with the world. With Rothko the art of painting has come again to draw aside the veil and communicate, to accept and reject as in every human exchange, to sort out and order, and to lift itself to the level of a mythic monumentality, irresistibly appealing in the beauty of its colors and perfect in the metrical harmony of its language.
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