Rothko Painted Big

Nathalie writes:

Mark Rothko created a new form of abstract painting that was characterized by his extreme attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; but still, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

By 1949 Rothko had introduced a compositional format that would be repeated throughout the remainder of his career. He would paint two, three, or four rectangular forms, vertically aligned and set within a colored field. By using these rectangles of color on large canvases he explored the expressive potential of color contrasts and modulations. The key term here is “expressive” as Rothko’s intention was for the viewer to have an emotional interaction with his art.

Rothko was born in Russia but came to the US with his family and attended school in Portland. He later went to Yale on a scholarship and began studying engineering and law, but dropped out and moved to New York City in the early 1920s. He spent the majority of his time working, teaching art to children in a Jewish school in Brooklyn. However, he still managed to produce a consistent flow of work from the late 1920s through the 1930s.

During the 1940s Rothko's paintings because much more symbolic as a cause of the social anxiety surrounding the 1930s and the years of World War II. He believed that both new subjects and new ways of expressing them needed to come about so that art could express “the tragedy of the human condition”. He 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." Around this time he also began to work on a larger scale, starting with pieces such as Rites of Lilith.

It is said that Rothko stopped painting for about a year in 1940 to read philosophy and mythic literature, and that during this time he was struggling with depression. (He had to deal with bouts of depression throughout many time periods in his career).

In the late 1940s Rothko stopped using almost any elements of surrealism or mythic imagery in his paintings, as well as representations of the figure and the natural world. His new works, the paintings of 1947-1949, are sometimes referred to as “multiforms” –these are paintings in which liquid paint soaks the canvas, leaving soft, indistinct edges, while whitish outlines surround some of the painted shapes. These new forms were Rothko’s vehicle for conveying emotion.

During the late 1940s, he described the notion of a painting in which "shapes"--or "performers"--first emerge as "an unknown adventure in an unknown space." He said that these "shapes have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them, one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms."

Rothko stopped using conventional titles in 1947. Instead he would use numbers or colors in order to distinguish between paintings. With this, he also resisted explaining the meaning of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, meaning that words would give the viewer presuppositions coming into the work, which would pollute their ability to have a purely emotional experience from it.

In Rothko’s “signature” paintings, (those composed of vertically aligned floating rectangles) color and structure are inseparable: the forms themselves consist of color alone, and it is just their being translucent and layered that gives us a sense of depth. Space and color take on a strong presence of their own. And Rothko said that the large scale of these canvases was intended to contain or envelop the viewer--not to be "grandiose," but "intimate and human."

In his words:

”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.

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. 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.”
--quotation courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago


Towards the end of Rothko’s career, the colors used in most of his paintings became much darker. He worked on pieces for the Four Seasons Restaurant in NYC, but also continued to produce his own work. He was ill during his final years- he suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, (a result of his high blood pressure), and ignoring doctor’s orders he continued to drink and smoke heavily. Then on February 25, 1970 Rothko’s assistant found him dead in his kitchen, where the artist had committed suicide. He was 66 years old.




Viewers have taken much interest in Rothko’s striking style, and his ability to deviate from “the norm”- but above all, it should be understood that he was an artist who set out to express human emotion. He disliked having his work categorized, insisting. “… I’m not an abstractionist… I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions… the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”