'THE SIMPLE EXPRESSION OF THE COMPLEX THOUGHT.'
Mark Rothko, whose name is possibly most famous outside the art world for legal scandal, what the New York Times dubbed 'the art worlds Watergate,' (regarding his paintings and their 'disposition' after his death) was one of the major exponents of the Abstract Expressionist movement; along side de Kooning and Pollock, as well as Guston, Kline, Newman and Clyfford Still. Evolving from the 'New York School' of artists, Abstract Expressionism embraced not any one particular style, but rather a general attitude; not all work was abstract, nor was it all expressive. They dealt in "morally loaded themes," of the "heavyweight and tragic, on a grand scale," 1 whilst retaining a measure of individuality and spontaneity.

Rothko's most celebrated works, those of his 'classic' era, employing his 'signature format,' evolved from the late 1940's, after which he painted in no other style, always revising and refining the process, right up to the time of his death. My decision to study Rothko was initially the prompt of a BBC 2 programme, (as is elaborated upon later) which developed into an empathy with his works, leading me to the research this study is based on.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz, in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia) September 26, 1903, Rothko and his family were Jews, among a hostile population.

At the age of ten, along with his mother and sister, Rothko immigrated to America to join his father and brothers, who had previously settled in Portland, Oregon. He studied the 'Liberal Arts' at Yale, 1921-3 and in 1925, moved to New York, enrolling in the Art Students League, under Max Weber, but later working under his own steam. He came to teach at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, 1929-52, and put on his first one-man exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, 1933.

The end of 1934 saw an exhibition, in which Rothko participated, at the Gallery Succession, whose members included Louis Harris, Adolph Gottlieb, Ilya Bolotowsky and Joseph Solman. Several months later, they, including Rothko left the Succession to form the Ten in 1935; a group of expressionist tendency.

Painting mostly "street scenes and interiors with figures" in the 1930's, Rothko rejected conventional modes of representation, and stressed an emotional approach to the subject, (an approach he admired in children's art) adopting a style characterized by "deliberate deformations and a crude application of paint." 2

His paintings of this time, post economic depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, have a "haunted air," such as his images of the New York subway, "in which windows, portals, and walls serve as structural and expressive devices of confinement." 3 Figures, as can be seen in the examples below, look emaciated and tired, accentuated by their elongated appearance. They paint a grim picture of the times, dominated by a depressive lack of colour in the case of the middle image for instance, Underground Fantasy.


Entrance to Subway [Subway Scene],

1938 Underground Fantasy [Subway], c. 1930s,

Sketchbook drawing, mid -1930s.
In the period 1942-7, working in association with Gottlieb, Rothko embarked upon a surrealist phase, drawing upon Greek mythology, primitive art, Christian tragedy and symbolism by way of contrast to an era dominated by a "social climate of anxiety" 4 and the worst years of World War II. In his work, there started to emerge traces of what would become his aforementioned 'signature format,' the primordial shapes; the horizontals and experimentation of techniques, leading to the development of a 'luminosity,' used to such great effect in his classic paintings.

The key characteristic to his work during this period can be summarised as a distinct lack of figure. Rothko once said, "It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes.... But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it." 5

Rothko talked of a "Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times:"

The "eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas… symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance.... The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavour, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life." 6

At this time, Rothko also started experimenting with horizontal bands, (as can be seen in the background of Hierarchical Birds, (1944) opposite) which have been said by some to represent geological strata - the land, the sea marked by horizons, the sky and beyond stacked on top - possibly a metaphor for the unconscious; a preoccupation with life and death.

Rothko increasingly worked to a larger scale than he had previously employed, another key change and progression in his art, now drawing inspiration from the surrealist technique of automatic writing - "letting the brush meander without conscious control in an attempt to release the creative forces of the unconscious" 7 - in doing so, developing a more abstract imagery, with the likes of Joan Miró, André Masson, as well as Arshile Gorky, his principle mentors.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1944/1945 		A clear link/ influence can be drawn with these two examples of Rothko and Miró's work, Untitled and the Kerosene Lamp, the former clearly having emulated the squiggles etc, characteristic of Miró.
Joan Miró, The Kerosene Lamp, 1924
With Gottlieb, Rothko published the Abstract Expressionist Manifesto, which read as follows: ?To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explained only by those willing to take risks. ?This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. ?It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way - not his way. ?We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth… 8

By 1947, Rothko had discontinued his use of mythology, at least directly, and all "Figurative associations and references to the natural world disappeared." 9 What emerged were his so-called 'multi-forms,' (examples to the left - Number 15, 1948 and right - No. 8 [Multiform], 1949) dabbling in abstraction. Rothko started to talk of his art as actors, performing drama as well as the notion of tragedy and the transcendental.
Linear elements were progressively eliminated, as asymmetrically arranged patches of color became the basis of his compositions. At this point Rothko began to paint the edges of his stretched canvases, which he displayed without confining frames.
Having abolished the use of frames, Rothko in addition abandoned the entitling of his work, his paintings now unencumbered by any imposed interpretations, pure in the eyes of the viewer. "Silence is so accurate," 10 he said, fearing that words would only paralyse the viewer's mind and imagination.

Number 10, 1950 		Rothko sought to embrace the viewer, even intimidate them to avoid his works becoming background pieces [presumably the equivalent of music vs. 'musak'], which explains why he pulled out of the Seagram Commission; where his works would have been background to a restaurants main function; that of eating!
White Center, 1950
By 1950 Rothko had reduced the number of floating rectangles to two or three, at most four, and in doing so arrived at a format he obviously felt at ease with, for it went unchanged from now on until his death. His move towards larger canvasses still, was, as Rothko stated, because the large scale of these canvases was intended to contain or envelop the viewer - not to be "grandiose," but "intimate and human." 11 He elaborated:

Rothko in his West 53rd Street studio, painting what may be a version of Untitled, 1952-1953

"Since my pictures are large, colorful, and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale. I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare. By saturating the room with the feeling of the work, the walls are defeated and the poignancy of each single work...become[s] more visible." […] "I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture. This may well give the key to the observer of the ideal relationship between himself and the rest of the pictures. I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted. And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space."12
Rothko also added this interesting interpretation of scale to the debate: "Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way." 13 Such sentiments highlight a wish for interaction between viewer and painting; a two-way discourse. Rothko explained, "A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky act to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their infliction universally." 14
The palette employed by Rothko during the late 1950's was considerably darker than anything that went before, a development related to his Seagram murals, commissioned for the Four Seasons Restaurant, (though never bestowed upon them) in 1958, the first of three mural projects. In them, Rothko employed reds, maroons, browns and blacks, as opposed to the more vibrant colours of the past. Bill Scarf, one of Rothko's studio assistants, described these darkening works as "slabs of frightened light." 15
In addition, the Seagram commission ushered in a change from closed motifs, to an open form. The darkened palette continued to dominate Rothko's work well into the 1960s, when he developed a "painstaking technique of overlaying colours until, in the words of art historian Dore Ashton, 'his surfaces were velvety as poems of the night.' " 16

Untitled [Seagram Mural],c. 1958
The Nobel Prize winning economist and friend of Rothko's, Wassily Leontief was the chief engineer of the Harvard Commission, Rothko's second attempt at the mural format, followed by the Rothko Chapel paintings, (commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil for the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, which occupied Rothko between 1964 and 1967). His work started to lend itself to a feeling of enclosure, (as aforementioned) a more specific use of space, invoking a meditative quality, "clearly [relating them] to the spiritual nature of a chapel." 17