You know the old phrase ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,’ well that applies to my admiration of the work of the American artist Mark Rothko. I’m not really sure why I like his big bold colourful paintings, I just do. Sure, on my more cynical days, I look at them and think ‘I could do that’ but I used to think that about some of the work of Francis Bacon, until I tried it one day and all my figures, painted in that smeared Bacon style, tended to look like Sid James.

In 2016,  I was at the Abstract Expressionism show at the Royal Academy, having gone there mainly to see a Jackson Pollock  and a Robert Motherwell painting close up and then, I found myself standing in front of the large Rothko canvasses. Suddenly, I got it. Seeing them that big and that close up, they sort of made sense somehow.

Fast forward to a week or so back when I was in a kitchen at a mate’s and saw he had a Rothko print on his kitchen Wall. ‘Rothko’ I said, pointing at it. ‘Nah, IKEA” he replied. Apart from instant flashbacks of Tony Hancock in the film The Rebel,  I knew then it was time to find out more about the man behind the brushes.

He was born Markus Yakolevich Rothkowitz in 1903, in Daugavpils, which is now in Latvia, but back then, was part of the Russian empire. His mother was Kate and his Father Jacob, a pharmacist, who was said to be a very bright man with a strong interest in politics. To avoid seeing his sons drafted into the Russian army, Jacob emigrated to the US and he was joined by the rest of the family in 1913. They settled in Portland Oregon with other family members. Sadly, Jacob died of cancer within months of seeing his family again and this left them with no means of support. Young Markus mourned his father’s death for a year, and then turned his back on the Jewish faith. He set to work to provide for himself and his family, selling newspapers from his uncle’s warehouse.

A bright child , instilled with an  extensive education from his father, he quickly picked up speaking English and was a success at school. He went to Yale on a scholarship, working as a waiter to support his studies, when that scholarship ended after the first year. Finding Yale racist and elitist, he dropped out at the end of his second year. He moved to New York and enrolled at Parsons School of Design and so began his life as artist 

He tried many styles as he learnt the craft, including Cubism, and early influences on him and his work, included Paul Klee. His work was exhibited in 1928 and it was then that he began to realise that a life as an artist was within his grasp. In 1932 he married jewellery designer Edith Sachar and in 1933, he exhibited at a one person show at Portland Art Museum. Back among his family whilst the show was on, he soon faced criticism from some of them, for his choice of career, especially during the Depression era. It was expressed to him, he should take a proper job and he support his widowed mother.

Instead, Rothko ploughed on with his artistic mission and formed an art  group called The Ten with fellow artists Adolph Gottlieb, Joseph Solman and Ralph Rosenborg among them. He continued to exhibit, as his reputation grew, both artistically and politically. The Ten were looking to run their own shows and break away to an extent from the normal gallery/ museum set up. He took American citizenship in 1938, as the growing threat of Nazism, made him fear deportation. He took the name Mark Rothko a year later.

After a reviewer in The New York Times described his reaction as one of befuddlement to their new work , Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto, written in the main by Rothko

‘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. We must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration.’

Mark and his wife Edith separated and divorced in 1943. Rothko, suffering from depression, decided to go back to Portland for a while to recover. Once he felt stronger, he returned to New York and towards the end of the year, exhibited at The Guggenheim Gallery. Sales were poor however and as a result, he decided to finally go fully abstract. He married again in 1945 to ‘Mell’ Beistle and they would go on to have a daughter Kate, in 1950 named after Rothko’s mother, and a son Christopher in 1963.

His work known as Multiform, basically blocks and shapes of colour, was a clear indicator of what was to come,  pointing towards the classic Rothko style we know today. From 1951, he began painting the largescale rectangular blocks of contrasting colour, like that, that one day, would end up in a kitchen in South East London. In an attempt to allow maximum interpretation of his work, Rothko  stopped naming and framing his work , and instead referred to them as numbers. He stated he wanted the viewer to feel ‘enveloped within’ the work.

Rothko – ‘The rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground. The green bar in magenta (and) black, (with) green on orange, on the other hand, appearing to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker. I realise that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However, you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command! 

Keeping up? Good.

His profile grew in the early 50s and he finally began to make some money from his art . As a counterpoint to that however,  from the mid to late 50s, his use of colour, grew less vibrant, and was said to indicate problems within his personal life . In truth, Rothko struggled being successful, indeed, he questioned why his art was being purchased. Was it because he was simply in fashion, or did the buyers truly understand his work . As a result, he withdrew slowly from public life , maintaining a silence when asked about the meaning of his painting

‘My paintings’ surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles, you can find everything I want to say, expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of 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 I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point.’

In 1958, he picked up a prestigious commission from the Seagram company. It was to supply a series of paintings for their, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed, luxury restaurant ‘The Four Seasons,’ situated within their new 525-foot skyscraper on Park Avenue. It was said Rothko was paid $30,000 for the paintings and he gladly accepted the challenge altering his normal landscape format to portrait, to work within the restaurant space.

However, by the time he spoke to Harper’s Magazine, he seemed to have had a change of heart. He said that he hoped the paintings were ‘something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch whoever eats in that room’. (I hope they)‘feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall. (Besides) anyone who can afford to eat food at those prices will never look at a painting of mine.’

Then upon seeing the restaurant first-hand, he thought it pretentious and decided to return his advance and discontinue the arrangement. Instead, he gifted the art to  The Tate in London. This whole episode would later inspire the play ‘Red’ by American writer John Logan, which was first produced at The Donmar Warehouse in London, originally starring Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant Ken.

A later commissioned piece was a more harmonious affair, when he was asked to supply large artwork for what was to be named the Rothko Chapel, which was purposely built in a post-modern style in Houston, Texas, funded by oil millionaires John and Dominique de Menil.

In preparation for that work, he moved to a large warehouse studio in New York, in which he recreated the space his chapel paintings were to go into. Sadly, by this time, his health was deteriorating after being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm. Despite warnings, he continued to drink and smoke heavily. Indeed, he was rarely seen without a lit cigarette in his hand or mouth. Gradually his condition worsened, and he lost a lot of weight and strength. He found it impossible to paint large canvasses and any work he did attempt, were now painted in acrylics, instead of oils.

 He also now had two assistants to help complete the work for the chapel, which consisted of a triptych in dark brown, with each panel being 5 x 15 foot in size . They were to be his last work and sadly, he wouldn’t live to see them in situ when they were unveiled in 1971.

He and his wife Mell had separated on New Year’s Day 1969 and Rothko moved into his studio. On February 25th, 1970, his assistant Oliver Steindecker found him dead. He had overdosed on barbiturates and had cut an artery in his arm. He left no note. He was 66. Ironically, The Seagram ‘Four Seasons’ paintings arrived at The Tate on the day he died. His wife Mell died 6 months later of a heart attack.

Then scandal. It came to light, that Rothko’s financial advisor Bernard Reis had sold a selection of paintings to the Marlborough Gallery, which in fact were intended for a foundation Rothko had set up. Their sale price was much reduced and then Reis and the Gallery spilt the profits from their subsequent sell on.  Rothko’s daughter Kate filed a claim over those sales and the court, eventually found in her favour, awarding her over $9 million in  costs. 

Ironically, this figure was now a fraction of the prices that Rothko’s paintings were now fetching at auction. Indeed, in the years to come, world record prices for his work were being achieved, as in 2012 when one sold at Sotheby’s for $75 million. with many others achieving similar prices, in subsequent years.

Little wonder then, that his work sells well in IKEA.

 

The Mumper of SE5

Read The Mumper’s other weekly musings on the The Speakeasy Blog page

 

 

 

 

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