Reflections on Rothko at the Louis Vuitton Foundation
on the artist life, fame & returning to pockets of silence
1
I’m at the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and I’m thinking about returning to the simplicity of forms—trying to recall that primordial conviction that leads us back to the creative source.1
A question: is it a truism that the artist must journey through strife, anonymity, public recognition and self-importance before returning to where they started and know themselves for the first time?
2
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been kneading and plying a novel into form called The Requisitions, whose initial conception—like all first drafts—was flawless in its infantile perfection.
But to give birth to an idea is different than to raise it, to elevate it, to sustain it, and to nurture it. In my experience, the first draft of a novel is proof that yes, it’s possible; the second draft is proof that yes, it’s shit; and subsequent drafts are proof of the existential tug-of-war between self-loathing self-doubt and ego self-transcendence that comes with creating something so deeply personal that it would be inconceivable to imagine anybody else making it.
After a decade sculpting The Requisitions into its truest form, I can finally be proud of having written something that is indefinably me,2 and as I stand in front of Rothko’s Blackforms, which took Rothko 57 years to complete, I’m reminded that art only ever takes the time it takes to complete because each work of art—be it a book, a song, a photograph, a choreography—is unto itself a homeward journey to the simplicity intricacy of its truest form.
3
The basement floor of the Rothko exhibit suggests the artist’s subconscious trying to break free of his era. Rothko’s early works (1920s-1930s) aren’t masterpieces, but they are a beginning, and what interests me most as I walk through the crowded gallery is Rothko’s uncanny paintings of human forms.
There’s something hauntingly grotesque about these human figures, as if a Rothko-ian truth is struggling to break free from within. These early Rothko works feature geometric shapes that writhe within the bodily figures of creatures that appear strangely inhuman. In Rothko’s own words, “I belong to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure; it did not meet my needs. Whoever used it mutilated it.” It took Rothko forty years to begin transitioning away from his attempts with the human figure; only after the crucibles of the Second World War did his style give birth to the massive rectangular blocks of fiery hues that came to define him.
4
A (brief) portrait of the artist as a young, poor immigrant: Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, AKA Mark Rothko, was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia. His family moved to Portland, Oregon in 1913. Rothko was a precocious teenager destined to live the life of a struggling artist: though he received a scholarship to Yale, he was forced to drop out after one year it wasn’t renewed; during the 1920s, he worked odd jobs and studied art with various mentors at the Art Students League and Parsons School of Design; in 1927, he illustrated The Graphic Bible but received no credit for his work and unsuccessfully sued the author and publisher; in 1929, Rothko began teaching art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he would continue teaching until 1952; in 1940, Rothko stopped painting and dedicated himself to writing an unfinished book, The Artist’s Reality (2004), which wasn’t discovered until after his death.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that Rothko’s experiments with color fields and began to attract the attention of wealthy New York art collectors, at which point the world—as is so often the case with artistic “success stories”—forgot where he’d come from … and for a time, Rothko did, too.
In 1969, Rothko received an honorary doctorate from Yale. His acceptance speech was the last time he spoke in public before his suicide, and as I walk through the Rothko retrospective, I resonate with what he meant by root and grow:
"When I was a younger man art was a lonely thing; no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden time, for then we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, and consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where they can root and grow. We must all hope that they find them."
5
The most renowned of Rothko’s experimentations with a darker color pallet are the Seagram Murals from 1958-1959, commissioned by a wealthy American capitalist to grace the Four Seasons restaurant in the opulent Seagram Building, Park Avenue, NYC.
Rothko was offered $35,000 to paint the murals, but the artist, who’d lived most of his life in near-poverty, had other plans for the commission, as he described in an interview with Harper’s Magazine: “I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.”
Something something don’t bite the hand that feeds … unless the hand that feeds is ripping out your soul. After struggling to achieve his artistic goal of making the paintings inseparable from the space they inhabited, in June, 1959, Rothko ate at the Four Seasons, where a painting by Jackson Pollock (Blue Poles, 1952), was hanging on the wall as a placeholder until Rothko’s murals could be installed.
That very night, Rothko lashed out at his assistant, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” To the shock of the New York art world, the deal was off. Rothko retreated from the limelight and the Seagram Murals disappeared into storage for a decade, until 1969, when Rothko reached a deal with the Tate Modern to permanently exhibit his work in the way he saw fit: within a specially-designed room with dim-lighting that forced the observer to acclimate to the obscurity before considering Rothko’s most pensive and oceanic paintings.
On February 25, 1970, the Seagram Murals were finally delivered to the Tate Modern. That very same day, just a few hours later—coincidence?—Rothko’s assistant found the dead artist in his studio with a deep, razor-sharp laceration along the inside of his right elbow, his body full of barbiturates sprawled out in a grotesque color field of his own blood, a 6ft x 8ft puddle on the floor.
6
By the time Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz Mark Rothko killed himself, he was an internationally renowned artist whose most expensive color field painting—Orange, Red, Yellow—would sell for $87 million in 2012.
In his twilight years, however, Rothko abandoned the yellows, reds, and oranges that defined his financial success in favor of dark hues of purples, browns, and blues (Black Forms) and the Black and Grays that he painted in the years leading up to his death.
Here at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Black and Grays are on the top floor, paired with the hauntingly human earthen sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. The knee-jerk reaction would be to conclude that Rothko’s final pieces represent his preoccupation with death, depression, and suicide, but I believe Rothko said it better than any armchair psychologist ever could: “I’m not interested in color. It’s light I’m after”—and what better way for a painter to investigate light than to focus exclusively on colors normally associated with darkness?
The elevator dings at the top floor of the museum. A child cries. A grandmother soothes. I read a Rothko quote on the far wall: “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene... that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” And if that isn’t enough to reconsider the philosophical value of investigating the darker palettes of our lives, consider these words from Arne Glincher, the renowned founder of the Pace Gallery in New York:
“Mr. Rothko, I’d like a happy painting,” a disappointed customer said. “A red painting, an orange painting, a yellow painting. A happy painting.” Rothko replied: “Red, orange, yellow—isn’t that the color of an inferno?”3
And as I stand amongst the Black and Grays, I don’t see violence or depression. Yes, they are stark, but these pieces don’t evoke sadness to me—they represent a willingness to peer into the abyss in order to illuminate the darkness. I see a wintry ocean and its horizon. I see the silver clouds of a coming storm. I the earth. I see a moonscape. But mostly I see the work of artist who was aware of his own mortality and understood the value in investigating the possibility that it was time for him to go.
The Requisitions is a historical metafiction about history, memory, and the Nazi Occupation of Poland. Yes, it’s finished, and the pitch is coming soon, alongside a limited-edition print-run.
and I have started our own little press to be able to make art exactly the way we want it to be without relinquishing 80% + of our publishing rights. Stay tuned in the next few weeks.https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-one-meal-made-rothko-cancel-his-first-major-commission
Thanks for the intriguing comments on the Rothko show, Samuel. You always have an interesting perspective. I really enjoyed the exhibit even though it became more difficult to linger with his paintings as I progressed through the show. It was a lot to take in.
Beautiful. The last lines punched me in the gut.