Rothko on Rothko

THE AMERICAN PAINTER MARK ROTHKO (1903-1970), whose Writings on Art is now published in an austere, unillustrated edition, was one of the most remarkable artists of his generation: the Abstract Expressionist generation that changed the course of modern Western painting.

He was also one of the most troubled artists of his time–a man at odds with society, with his fellow artists, with his medium, and, most tragically, with himself. Tragedy–in the Ancient Greek sense–was, indeed, the kind of exalted achievement that Rothko fervently aspired to in his painting. Yet it was his fate, in the mundane realm of modern earthly life, to become a casualty of his own tragic illusions. The grandest of these illusions–and the most difficult to countenance–was his insistent claim that he was not in any sense an abstract painter.

It was a claim that, inevitably, baffled the public, infuriated the critics, and left many of his cohort in the Abstract Expressionist movement wondering what he was talking about. After all, they had risked a great deal in abandoning the safe haven of representational painting for the unknown consequences of this plunge into abstraction. Yet here was one of their most esteemed fellow abstractionists insisting that he had never been an abstract painter–and he underscored the point by ridiculing certain types of abstraction that were unlike his own.

What has to be understood about this insistent mischaracterization of his own work is that Rothko’s thinking was not only deeply subjective–the same could be said of many artists–but that, in his case, the artist’s fundamental beliefs were also radically solipsistic. For Rothko, the self and its attributes, real or imagined, were the primary constituents of reality. What existed beyond the self was scarcely more than a featureless void. And if others did not see in his paintings what he claimed to see, that, too, hardly mattered. After all, wasn’t the entire history of modernist art a chronicle of its miscomprehension by the public and its critics?

This was anything but a ruse or a pose. Rothko firmly believed in the reality of the “subjects,” “figures,” and “things” that he attributed to his abstract paintings. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he proclaimed. “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject is valid which is tragic and timeless.”

In the heyday of Rothko’s success, from the late 1940s to the ’60s, when his command of color was at its peak of achievement, at once highly seductive and spiritual in feeling, claims of this sort could be more or less taken in stride. It was when he began to claim that “my new areas of color are things” and that “the shapes in the later canvases were new substitutes for the figures” that a certain skepticism began to be felt about all the later work, and skepticism turned into sheer bafflement and rejection when he insisted that the abstract shapes were figures, adding that “abstract art never interested me; I always painted realistically. My present paintings are realistic. . . . I am not a formalist.”

Of course, it is not uncommon for artists to believe that their work is misunderstood. But it is nonetheless rare for an artist of Rothko’s stature to make such a public display of his incomprehension of his own accomplishment. As I am not in the business of psychoanalyzing the minds of the painters I write about, I shall not attempt to explore the causes of Rothko’s curious predicament. Suffice it to say that Rothko’s pictorial talents were far greater than his intellectual command of what those talents produced, and his work will continue to be admired long after his muddled account of their alleged meaning has been forgotten.

Hilton Kramer, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, is the author, most recently, of The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War.