The Rabbi and the Moving Blur

By ROBERT HUGHES

Accident, madness and suicide have only one effect on an artist's career: they stop it. But they can do wonders for reputation. We might feel different about Van Gogh if, instead of shooting himself in the gut at 37, he had died full of age and honors in bed. The demand for Jackson Pollock's least scribble might be less fierce if a skidding car had not sent him the way of James Dean. And what of Mark Rothko, who killed himself with a razor and pills in 1970? In hindsight, death appeared to be the central image of Rothko's late, dark, claustrophobic canvases. Indeed, his suicide gave his art a simplified legibility that it did not really have-- the operatic wholeness of art and life that a myth-hungry audience expects of peintres maudits. In a grisly sort of way, Rothko's suicide has been taken by the art market as a proof of sincerity and translated into cash value. His paintings easily doubled in price within a year of his death. A long, bitter and sensational court battle ensued, during which Rothko's children successfully fought one of the world's biggest art dealers, Marlborough Galleries, for having contrived with his executors to acquire 800 paintings at far below their market price. Death and money; Rothko was terrified of one and catastrophically incompetent with the other, but they made him--and his work--famous in the end.

Last week the largest retrospective of Mark Rothko's paintings went on view in Manhattan. Organized by Art Historian Diane Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum, it will travel later to Houston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. It consists of almost 200 paintings, spanning a career of more than 40 years. They run from his first tentative exercises in the manner of Milton Avery, his mentor, whose soft, vibrating patches of color had an indelible effect on Rothko; thence to the curious, stilted subway scenes of the 1930s, and to the totemic abstracts of vaguely identifiable figures-in-landscape which were the staple of his work up to the end of World War II, culminating in Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944.

By 1948 he broke his truce between surrealism and abstraction. Preoccupied with "tragic and timeless" subject matter, Rothko wanted to invest the entire surface of the painting with a sense of awe, a ritualistic presence; and in groping toward this he produced some of the least satisfactory paintings of his career--vague, disconnected blots and blurs, pretty as begonias, but otherwise unremarkable. But gradually the patches coalesced, the structure firmed. His breakthrough came in 1949, with a painting named Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red, which created the formula he would explore (with variations) for the last 20 years of his life: tiers of color in bands and oblongs, softly glowing, stacked up on the canvas. Within this format, Rothko for the next dozen or so years produced one of the most articulate, subtle and prolonged meditations on color in the history of Western art. It had no real parallel among American painters: one needs to go to Matisse or Bonnard to find anything like its expressive scope and patient single-mindedness. Then came the forays into an increasing darkness, the mute theatricality of his penultimate paintings, the wide blackish-plum surfaces that scarcely "breathe" at all, and the dull, fiddling solipsism of the last works of 1969-70.

We see the work whole: the man, with his crankiness, suspicions and abundant neuroses, his unassuageable sense of not belonging, his self-pity and his addiction to booze and pills, is veiled behind the ceremonial diction of the catalogue--as he would have wished, perhaps. It is a moving exhibition, and not the least moving thing about it is its sense of failure. Rothko set himself goals which he could not meet, and he made demands on his art which no younger painters wanted to take up in emulation of him.

Rothko was not only a Jew, but a Russian. Though his parents took him from czarist Russia to America in 1913 when he was only ten, his origins were of immense significance to his art. He treated painting with the moral seriousness that Russians traditionally assigned to music or the novel. By art, he hoped, one is set free. The only art that could provide a model for life was the sublime. In that sense, Rothko was the last romantic painter, the heir to Turner or Caspar David Friedrich.

But to inherit is nothing; what counts is what an artist does with his legacy. The problems raised by Rothko's august aims were taxing. He lived in the wrong time and place. His ambition was rabbinical. He wanted to be a major religious artist, not a dealer's monk: to produce overwhelming images of transcendence and numinosity--the light of heaven, as it were, without the attendant saints and angels. But the images had no cultural environment to reinforce them. Rothko always protested against a narrowly aesthetic response to his work, but tie was addressing an audience of aesthetes, not true believers.

And he appeared to be an aesthete to his fingertips. Staining, scumbling, glazing, building up those exquisite oblongs of color, he coaxed an amazing range of effects from a nominally simple format. Sometimes the paint has the grainy opacity of stone, sometimes it is no more than a puff, a vapor with color bleeding through it. It is never crude and only rarely inert. In this way a most sonorous pictorial eloquence is placed at the service of incommunicable feelings, and the sad facts of Rothko's life rush in to complete the missing subject matter. In a sense, the late works are declarations of the impotence of painting: it could not blot up enough anguish, or take the burden of existence away from the artist. The Black Hole expanded to fill the canvas, but no surface could contain the hole. --Robert Hughes

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