Look at Mark Rothko

The text makes instructive reading, largely as inoculation against the fallacy in which it is drenched. Christopher Rothko’s rhetorical posturing mirrors Mark Rothko’s delusional grandeur. Florid overreach rises to an unintended argument against the role of Art as presumptive heir to the errands of a Church. The son channels the spirit of the father’s “path to the absolute,” a self-glorifying excursion that permits stopping en route anywhere the plumbing works and the cuisine pleases. To seek the sacred but with no obligation to it—and no humility before it—has been Art’s evolving game since German Idealism provided impetus in the late 18th century. Rothko, a professed atheist, excelled at the romance.

The most aureate of Abstract Expressionism’s declamatory high priests, the painter was born Markus Rotkovich in Latvia, then part of czarist Russia. Ten years old when he arrived in the United States, the boy grew up in Portland and came east on a scholarship to Yale. After freshman year, his scholarship was rescinded and replaced with a student loan. A voracious reader but desultory student, Rothko quit the next year. He settled in New York in 1925, the year he took up painting at the Art Students League under the Russian-born Max Weber. This was Rothko’s only formal art training. Decades of teaching, working, exhibiting, and aggressive networking followed. He established himself among other, mainly emigré, artists who called themselves “The Ten,” the nucleus of what came to be called the New York School.

An artist’s minyan, they gathered in downtown bars to complete the liberation of visual art from the degrading obligation to imitate nature: Creative genius demands total freedom from obsolete models of intelligibility; the human figure, first among shackles on the primacy of subjectivity, need no longer apply as a measure of distinction.

On the evidence of Rothko’s own early figurative works, abandonment of the human form was prudent. He had little aptitude for visual reality, none at all for those deliberate, knowledgeable distortions that elevated Max Beckmann’s expressionism. Rothko disguised his deficit in high-minded rationalization: “After the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.”

Christopher Rothko was only 6 when his father committed suicide. The son’s relationship with his father was largely vicarious, conducted posthumously by reading the painter’s own recorded statements and writings. These accumulate in unintended witness to the power of assertion over what meets the eye. The author pledges not to “demystify” his father’s painting nor interfere with “the sacredness” of our communion with it. We can hardly expect him to: He chairs the board of Houston’s Rothko Chapel, a nonprofit that exists (in its words) “to inspire people to action through art and contemplation.”

Trained in clinical psychology, Christopher Rothko abandoned practice early to make a life’s work of fostering his father’s estate. Appeals to psychology thread through the text. Emphasis on the psychology of color recalls Le Corbusier’s comment on his chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp: The single factor driving design was not ritual requirements but “the psychophysiology of the feelings.” Mark Rothko desired a public who would “not only listen to but venerate” his work. The paintings come to us as relics, much like Padre Pio’s bloodstained gloves. But with a singular difference: Here the stains serve as a Rorschach test that tells us not about the saint but about ourselves. The truth of T. E. Hulme’s remark that art has come to be “spilt religion” expands here to include spilt psychoanalysis as well:

Gestalt therapy was in vogue during Rothko’s working years. Alert to cultural signals, Christopher Rothko seizes the word gestalt, flashing it as a badge of gravity: “My father’s paintings are gestalts.” Looking at a Rothko stands bail for a therapeutic session; it is “a gateway to our inner selves.” We enter “the gestalt of a Rothko painting” and, under its guidance, penetrate to the heart of “our own inner workings.” In that moment of self-discernment, we encounter the artist as well:

As if in parody of prophetic intuition, Christopher Rothko’s prose imitates that blend of brass and grandiosity crucial to Mark Rothko’s image as the End of Art History incarnate: “You can’t really learn about Rothko, for that ‘knowledge’ will keep you rooted in one place. You have to learn to speak Rothko to have a conversation that invokes timelessness.”

Apologist for his father’s magisterial view of the artist as “torchbearer of the philosophical,” Christopher Rothko endorses the misconception that art serves a function analogous to that of language. The son concedes a head start in “developing fluent Rothko.” Nevertheless, “anyone should be able to become conversant.”

But what of crusty souls who never get the lingo, the ornery ones whose prompts to “gazing resolutely inward” operate outside the precincts of art?

People who dislike the work are those whose “anger stems from something other than the content of the artwork.” They are likely to be intimidated by its “seeming emptiness,” unable to penetrate the generosity of its “essential blankness.” Ideas—other than pictorial ones—are not an artist’s métier. But for Rothko, “ideas were paramount.” No evidence can be brought against them. The son allows nothing to bear against inflated claims made for the work of the father. An agile publicist, he upends negative responses. Those who question the work’s greatness are, “in essence, confirming that Rothko’s art communicates on a deep emotional level; that it is, in the truest sense, emotionally disturbing.” The author leaves no room for the possibility that some might be indifferent to Mark Rothko’s work precisely because they understand it.

Might Rothko have preferred to be a musician? Was painting a compromise?

A Rothko hovers between both worlds: “The spaces in Rothko paintings are filled with music, and indeed they readily serve as nurseries for the creation of music.” Rothko’s work “is symphonic in scale and ambition.” Rothko “is like some of the greatest composers in music history—Dufay, Bach, Mahler.” Prose purples to depict the painter as the climax of a resplendent era, “singing an impassioned final aria” before Pop Art arrived to ransack the opera house.

Attention lingers inevitably on the three major commissions that absorbed him from 1958 to 1969. These were the monumental canvases—called murals—for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building; for Harvard’s Holyoke Center; and for the chapel at the Institute of Religion and Human Development in Houston. Known as the Rothko Chapel, the capstone of his career was dedicated in 1971, a year after the artist opened his veins in his studio with a palette knife.

By now, Rothko’s comment on the Four Seasons appointment has entered folklore: “I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” He resented having to serve a patron (Philip Johnson, architect of the building’s interiors) and a public (“the richest bastards in New York”). He was the one whose needs should be met because Rothko “was the one who was producing something truly important.”

A light to the nations is lost in an eatery. Rothko famously voided his contract by returning the money, convinced that no painting should be displayed in a public space. He envisioned his work installed in a series of chapels, each one a tabernacle sheltering the real presence of his own interior monologues revealed on canvas. It was a biblical ambition parasitic on the Holy of Holies, focus of Jewish prayer: “I have consecrated this house which you have built, and put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time” (I Kings 9:3).

Thus began the Rothko Chapel, funded by John and Dominique de Menil. Human rights activists and blue chip art collectors, the Menils were Roman Catholics devoted to the “broadly inclusive principles” of Vatican II. Their faith in a declared atheist to create “something of deep meaning and religious resonance” is as much a reminder of the spirit of Vatican II as it is a token of collector sanctimony. Multipurpose, the chapel (“truly a gestalt”) was designed by Rothko himself. Bunker-style, it is a conventional salaam to modernist disdain for the idea that religious impulse imposes any duties on architecture.

That form follows function is a central tenet of modernist design. And the form of a chapel, as that of any church, serves a distinct liturgical function. But religion-in-general has no liturgy, no unambiguous purpose, requires no essential spatial orientation. In terms of modernist credo, a nondenominational chapel, like the unicorn, is a fiction. So the Rothko Chapel is better seen as an architectural folly, a kunsthalle with airs, and its existence confirms Louis Dupré’s observation that “culture itself has become the real religion of our time, absorbing traditional religion as a subordinate part of itself. It offers some of the emotional benefits of religion, without exacting the high price faith demands.”

Mark Rothko has ascended into myth. And the chapel needs to keep him there.

The National Register of Historic Places listed it a scant 30 years after construction, waiving its own requirement that a site be at least 50 years old to warrant historic status. In 2009, National Geographic featured the chapel in its guide to Sacred Places of a Lifetime. A mitzvah tank for collectors, it endures as a pilgrimage site for aesthetes, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and world-improvers. The space hosts orthodox multicultural programs ranging from hip-hop and Black Lives Matter to eco-spirituality, indigenous people’s rights, and the healing sound of crystal bowls.

In the end, Rothko’s suicide was more eloquent than his paintings, lovely as the “classic” ones are. His son nods to the fact indirectly by committing a chapter to arguing against it. But as spectator of his own work, Mark Rothko was intimate with the distance between painting and ultimate reality. Color alone can hold a wall; it is not enough to sustain a life.

Maureen Mullarkey is a senior contributor to the Federalist and keeps the weblog Studio Matters.