Forever sublime

When people talk about abstract expressionism, the artistic movement that made its mark in the "brave new world" of post-WWII America, two names spring to mind. The most recognisable to Australians - because of the National Gallery of Australia's landmark purchase of his Blue Poles and because of the film starring Ed Harris - is Jackson Pollock. But among the abstract expressionist artists, another name emerges as a giant of the form - Mark Rothko. In fact, despite sharing the abstract expressionist tag and the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock and Rothko could be seen as exact opposites; and in many ways, Rothko became the anti-Pollock.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz on September 25, 1903, in Dvinsk, Russia, Rothko left Russia with his family in 1913. After passing, like so many immigrants, through Ellis Island and New York City, the family eventually settled in Portland, Oregon. A prodigious intellect even in those early years, Rothko attended Yale University on scholarship in 1921 - but he didn't study art. He instead took on a "smorgasbord" of studies including English, French, European history, elementary mathematics, physics, biology, and economics, the history of philosophy, and general psychology. He originally intended to become either a lawyer or an engineer.

He remained there for 2 years, but then left university without a degree and moved to New York. In 1925, he studied under Max Weber at the Art Students League; and participated in a group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries in New York in 1928. At this stage, his work, under Weber's influence, was in the style of Cezanne, although clearly the young artist was still experimenting.

During the early 1930s, Rothko became a close friend of Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. The times though were tough following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and like many of his contemporaries, this was reflected in his art. He painted mostly scenes from life (like Street Scene, c. 1937); but they were never direct representations of what he saw. He tried to emphasise the emotional aspect of the work, often altering the visual plane or using unnatural colours - techniques pioneered by the expressionists.

His first solo show took place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933. A solo exhibition in New York followed in 1933. In 1935, he became a founding member of the Ten, a group of artists who embraced both abstraction and expressionism.

By the early 1940s, Rothko's style had moved away from images from life and into symbolic works reflecting the collective angst of a nation only just emerged from the Depression only to be plunged into a world war. The style was distinguished by the use of themes from mythology, simple shapes, and images inspired by primitive art. He progressed to dabbling with surrealist images.

In 1947 and 1949, Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and it was in this period that his mature style developed. Drawing on surrealism's fascination with the floating image, and combining it with a pure abstraction, he began placing rectangles of colour on the canvas. Some of his works in this style during the period from 1945 - 1950 appear rather "busy", with the colours appearing to fight for space on the canvas.

By 1950 however, Rothko had reduced the number of rectangles to a mere few, and placed them vertically on a coloured background, finally arriving at the style for which he is best remembered.

In the following decades, Rothko developed the so-called "colour field" technique. Where Pollock was where concerned with the creation of a kinetic, almost organic, outward-looking art, Rothko went the other way. His works suggest a contemplative, introspective approach to art. They suggest emotion purely through the use of colour, not form.

Rothko also began the practice of giving his paintings numbers rather than names. Later he would give them simple descriptive titles or no titles at all. These were all designed to allow the work to speak for itself - or more correctly, to allow viewers to experience the work for themselves - without any preconceived notions imparted by the artist. As Rothko once famously declared, "Silence is so accurate". Consistent with this rather "hands off" approach, the artist refused to talk about his techniques; instead challenging viewers to find the "tragedy" in his paintings.

Although superficially the style changed little between the early 50s and the late 60s, Rothko experimented with a variety of techniques. He often preferred to use an unprimed canvas, so as to allow the paint to seep directly into the backing. While his "fields" were always of one colour, they were often carefully constructed, with the colour built up in several layers to give them a luminous quality and the illusion of "hovering" on the canvas. Later he would mask the edges of his works, and in the late 1960s, would occasionally abandon the rectangles altogether, making the whole surface one colour; prompting the art historian Doe Ashton to comment "his surfaces were velvety as poems of the night".

In 1958, Rothko received his first commission, for paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. From then on, he would become renowned for his work in murals. His murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964 were landmarks. He also accepted (but eventually did not complete) a commission for the then new Seagram Building in New York.

But his most famous work was what is now known as the Rothko Chapel; a mural commission from the de Menil family for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. He worked virtually continuously on the chapel project between 1965 and 1967. Of all the artists working at the time, Rothko was uniquely placed to create something special with the chapel project. It was the ultimate culmination of his contemplative style. Indeed, his work referenced the historical notion of the "sublime", in which the viewer is drawn in to an experience of the immensity of nature, an experience that has distinctly religious connotations.

Over-work, over-eating, and over-indulgence in alcohol and barbiturates however saw Rothko's health fail in the later years of the 1960s. Sick and depressed, Rothko committed suicide on February 25, 1970. In the last act in his "tragedy" he died on the floor of his studio.

David Edwards

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