Stop and Look – Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko (1956)
I’m always fascinated by the tendency of abstract artists towards radical simplification. Not content with eliminating representational subject matter from their pictures, they go on to eliminate everything else, too, so that for most of their careers — several decades, anyway — they dedicate themselves to presenting the same simple idea over and over again.
One of the earliest of them, the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, reduced his pictures to grids of black on a white ground, with some of the resulting squares variously coloured. In England, Ben Nicholson got rid of landscape or still life elements and painted a long succession of grids solely in white, sometimes very large, sometimes partially in relief. The American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s opted for enormous canvases devoted to a single pictorial idea: Sam Francis made apparently random watercolour-like splashes, Jackson Pollock overlapping strings of thrown paint, Clyfford Still tall, ragged rents of colour in expanses of darkness. (As an aside, can I whisper that Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his entire career.)
Mark Rothko opted for the most minimal of all these procedures. He too favoured great size — critics at the time compared his preoccupation with vast scale with the nineteenth-century artists’ love of huge landscapes, the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls and so on. The word “Sublime” was much employed. He reduced the content of his pictures to enormous squares of colour hovering on top of each other, sometimes strongly contrasted, sometimes, as here, subtly differentiated so that the eye hardly knows where one “colour field” ends and another begins.
A particularly interesting thing about these paintings is the response of their viewers. If you go into a roomful of Mark Rothko in, say, the Phillips Collection in Washington, you will see people standing transfixed or lying on the floor in front of them, or kneeling, lost in prayerful meditation. This example in Buffalo can easily be seen as an enormous, sun-filled sky. In Houston, Texas, the Rothko Chapel holds a sequence of huge canvases in deep purples and blacks, hung on the walls of an octagonal space, lit by a broad white light in the centre of the ceiling.
I have spent some time in that Chapel, watching not so much the pictures themselves as the fascinating varieties of visitors who come to pay their respects. “Respect” is obviously a leading emotion, and it’s engendered by the sheer size and the amorphous character of the works. The Chapel was founded by John and Dominique de Menil in 1971, as an ecumenical centre for worship and contemplation by people of all faiths and none. Members of the public clearly feel that they’re in the presence of something larger than themselves, spiritually larger. One visitor while I was there was a young man who had brought his prayer mat with him and prostrated himself — to Mecca? To the god Rothko? To Art?
London has its own Rothko Room, at Tate Modern. The pictures form a similar set, just as gloomy as those in the Chapel, but were not intended to hang in any sort of “spiritual” setting. They were to adorn a restaurant, the Four Seasons, in New York. That context would have been in sharp contrast to Rothko’s own conception of his work, which, he said, was “the opposite of what is decorative”. As the Tate’s website tells us, he saw the series “as objects of contemplation, demanding the viewer’s complete absorption”. I would agree that any worthwhile picture should be an “object of contemplation”, but I think I would have difficulty giving all my attention to paintings like this while trying to enjoy a good dinner.
Maybe to have achieved such a level of rarefied grandeur, with its obvious appeal to the profounder instincts of a large audience, is all that an artist can possibly aspire to. Mark Rothko declared that, “All art deals with intimations of mortality”, and said that his paintings “are facades”: they are large in order “to create a state of intimacy. A large picture is an immediate transaction; it takes you into it.” This is the artist’s rationalisation of his obsession with images shorn of almost all external reference. Perhaps we should see him as a priest, a shaman, a mediator between the earthly and the ineffable, the divine — or at any rate the Sublime.
Is a place of worship perhaps the only proper location for the works of Rothko’s maturity? I fear it can’t be a complete coincidence that while the Houston Chapel was being built, Mark Rothko, plagued by depression, took his own life.
Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.