A Certain Spell

"There is no such thing," Mark Rothko once said, "as good painting about nothing." Yet if there is a painter alive who appears to be painting nothing, it is Rothko. Line, subject, perspective--all are gone; says Rothko himself: "You have here nothing--but content."

Last week 54 of Rothko's paintings were on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, showing 15 years of the development of a man who is one of the top half-dozen abstract painters in the U.S.--one who has created a personal idiom that pleases the initiated but to the others dramatizes some of the limitations of abstractionism. In canvas after canvas, glowing rectangles of color float over other rectangles. Each canvas is a study in contradiction: everything seems in shimmering motion, but nothing moves at all. The paintings offer windows looking out on blind space, but remain as two-dimensional and flat as the canvas itself. The same formula seems to be repeated over and over again, yet the moods evoked are many. Rothko's paintings are as remote and silent as some forgotten civilization, but if contemplated long enough, they do cast a certain spell.

Yale & Starvation. Rothko's father was a Russian Jewish pharmacist who took his family to the U.S. in 1913. Rothko grew up in Portland, Ore., with nary a thought of becoming an artist: he wanted to be a labor leader. He attended Yale, dropped out to ''wander around, bum about, starve a bit." It was not until 1925, when he was 22, that he settled down in Manhattan to attend Max Weber's art classes at the Art Students League. He did not stay long. As a painter, Mark Rothko is almost wholly self-taught.

He began as a realist ("That was what we inherited"), passed through a stage that was "allied to surrealism," finally went wholly abstract. By 1947 he was already turning out compositions of floating colors. In the years since, Rothko has achieved an almost elemental simplicity, which he likes to explain in more complicated fashion. ''In our inheritance we have space, a box in which things are going on," he says. "In my work there is no box; I do not work with space. There is a form without the box, and possibly a more convincing kind of form."

Rembrandt's a Noun. Rothko worries a good deal about the notion of image. " 'Rembrandt' has become a noun," says he, "a noun that conjures up a particular kind of painting. 'Rembrandt' has become an image." So, indeed, in a smaller way has Rothko, and this automatically places a limit on his striving toward the limitless. To Rothko, almost everything depends on the viewer's being able to approach a painting as a pure and unique experience, for which he should not be prepared. The impact of color, the electric shimmer of an edge, the intensity of a shape must alone bear the message. There should be no associations, only sensation: since the viewer should recognize nothing, there should be no barriers to his flight.

But how much flight can a viewer get? Even on Rothko's own terms, his image, once seen, is only too recognizable in the next painting, and the essential innocence of the viewer is destroyed. The spell is there -- it simply does not last.

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