A smaller show and lighter touch would better connect viewers to the art.
Mark Rothko is the overwrought, impossible, stellar retrospective of the artist at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris. With nearly 120 Rothkos from the 1930s, long before Rothko was Rothko, through to his last, unfinished picture from 1970, it’s an extravaganza. The Vuitton Foundation, in the Bois de Boulogne, is a massive, modern exhibition hall owned by the luxury-brands maker. Two years ago, it presented the brilliant Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art, which I loved and was dazzled by. The Rothko exhibition? So much about it was wrong, wrong, wrong. It closed earlier this month, and it’s taken me a long time to read the catalogue and parse my thoughts.
Rothko (1903–1970) is the instantly recognizable Abstract Expressionist painter. During his classic period, a time between the early 1950s and his suicide, Rothko made large pictures, nearly square, depicting rectangular blocks of color stacked two or three high and with ragged, gauzy edges. The rectangles seem to float on a background color. Colors often contrast, sometimes emphatically, but often they differ so slightly, especially in his dark paintings, that they seem at first to be monochromatic. His paint layers are thin, so his blocks sometimes look diaphanous, like puffy clouds. Within the rectangles, the background color sometimes makes ghostly shapes as it bleeds through the paint covering it. These translucent passages look like hovering spirits. I think about the shades, the remains of the dead in Greek myths.
My basic, beginner’s rule in developing a retrospective is that you don’t want to present something that makes visitors like the artist less. In this respect, and in part, we’ve got Mark Rothko himself to blame for Mark Rothko leaving viewers sullen, disappointed, and annoyed. “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene,” he wrote, “that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” This quote is a jarring wall headline. “I am the most violent of all the New Americans,” he said of himself and avant-garde confrères such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. “Behind the color lies the cataclysm.”
So much for viewers who think his work is, first and foremost, serene.
Rothko said he paints big because “a large picture is an immediate transaction . . . it takes you into it and creates a level of intimacy.” He wants, he says, viewers to be “co-creators” as his paintings absorb them. He wants us to find “tragedy, ecstasy, doom” in them. Putting aside his bossy attitude, it’s impossible in the Vuitton Foundation galleries, spacious and comfortable as they are, to find any level of intimacy with a painting with 100 other people, or hundreds of other people, jostling for a look.
Does a little of Rothko go a long way? Seeing one on its own in a mostly empty museum gallery, or seeing three together as an ensemble, is magical. Seeing 120 does more than break the spell. It breaks it, backs up, pumps the gas, and flattens what’s left of it.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Mark Rothko starts with his only self-portrait, painted in 1936. The balding, decidedly homely artist wears dark glasses, so he seems elusive and weird. He is entering his mid 30s but is still years away from his signature painting style. Born in rural Latvia to Jewish but anti-religious parents, he moved to Portland in Oregon as a child. His father, poor but learned, fled there to establish a new home to which he would import his wife and, one by one, his children. Rothko, then Markus Rotkovitch, came alone, with a label around his neck reading “I don’t speak English.” He went to Yale as an undergraduate but dropped out and later called the school a “house of the dead.” He gravitated to New York, met the artists Max Weber and Milton Avery, and decided to become an artist himself. In 1940, he changed his name to Mark Rothko.
Mark Rothko dedicates nearly an entire floor of the Vuitton Foundation to Rothko’s works from the 1930s into the early ’40s. They’re representational and very good, no one would recognize them as work by Rothko, and there are far too many of them. His subject, we’re told, is urban alienation. He painted subway-station interiors, and some are indeed drab. Much is made of the dehumanizing effect of Western culture and economic organization. The Subway, from 1937, and Entrance to Subway, from 1938, seem more like reflections on the architectural support piers in subway stations than on how the Enlightenment undermined connectedness, as one scholar writes in the catalogue.
Rothko seems to shift and struggle, not with composition, form, or color, on all of which he’s always good, but on a style and message. I think of Philip Guston, who flirted in the 1930s and ’40s with both the social realism of Ben Shahn and the surrealism of John Graham. De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Pollock, and Adolph Gottlieb went through experimental phases, too, in New York and at the same time. Rothko was not unsuccessful. He belonged to a small group of emerging artists in the ’30s calling itself The Ten. Figurative, left-wing, Jewish, and mostly inspired by Picasso, the artists thought an association would help market their work, which it did. Rothko also taught art to children and had a WPA gig.
By the early ’40s, Rothko was painting animal, human, and vegetal forms that seem to be inspired by the Greek myths, especially stories of hybrid, split, or dismembered monsters. Forms seem to float, either underwater or in a murky, dense sky. As a group, they aren’t very good. They’re awkward and derivative, though Rites of Lilith, from 1945, at 82 by 106 inches, has wall power. Its cool palette of grays and whites, with passages of sandy brown, and abstract, geometric, ethereal figures evoke a primeval world. Lilith, in Jewish folklore Adam’s first wife but possibly a demon, is Rothko’s closest thing to a religious subject.
Making our way through the ’40s, we see that year by year Rothko’s approach evolves. Dank subway platforms have long ago disappeared. His forms become more abstract and ghostly, seeming to melt into the background color. In 1948 or so, he started painting what’s called his multiforms. A big one, 89 by 65 inches, is in the exhibition and belongs to Rothko’s daughter. Painted in 1948 and untitled, it’s a vertical rectangle canvas depicting nearly a dozen rectangle shapes, a dominant blue one and subsidiary red and yellow ones, floating on different backgrounds, one green but mostly red.
The exhibition includes a dozen of them, and I think they’re awful, random, listless blobs and puddles, or Pollocks that melted and oozed. The Met, the Chrysler Museum, the National Gallery, and the Menil Collection each own one, and Rothko’s family owns at least a few. The exhibition compares their randomness and oozy, congealed look to organic goop in a petri dish, seemingly unorganized, but organized and complete according to nature’s rules.
Then we see a group starting in 1950, when Rothko’s vision — both his principles and his passion — clicks. MoMA’s No. 5/No. 22, from 1950, seems to be a pivotal painting. At 117 by 107 inches, it’s big. The four horizontal rectangles in the painting don’t extend to the edge of his canvas but seem to float and hover. The shapes are balanced, geometric fields of color. Finding this structural clarity is immensely useful. Each rectangle has a chromatic aura, or afterlife, since looking at the forms below or above affects how we perceive other forms with a different palette.
In the Toledo Museum of Art’s 1960 Rothko, a cadmium-red rectangle floats over a cobalt blue field and the result is electric. Black rectangles above and below the red one fortify the drama. The picture has a pulse, as does SF MoMA’s orange, purple, and blue picture from 1960. In Light Cloud, Dark Cloud, from 1957, a mottled rose rectangle looks like cotton candy. It’s the yin to the yang of the dense red rectangle below it.
Rothko hated the word “colorist” — and hated it more when “superb,” “sublime,” “delightful, delicious, delovely,” and every other aggrandizing modifier was attached to it. “Colorist,” to him, meant “decorator,” or the killer word “decorative,” which could mean beautiful but implied that his buyers picked paintings because they matched the draperies. If you looked only at complementary or contrasting colors, Rothko said, “you missed the point.”
Color might not be “the point,” but at the very least it’s the pathway, and his compositions are, after all, made from color. “It’s the color, stupid,” I’d say to Rothko, who was more focused on violence, angst, doom, and tragedy as an oh-so-serious New York artist intellectual in the ’50s and ’60s. One failure of the exhibition is that it gives Rothko’s self-aggrandizing words a hefty platform.
Mark Rothko is not an embarrassment of riches. Rather, it’s a banquet where we’re fed too much. The Vuitton Foundation, and I can understand the temptation, asked for many works. The Met does this, too, and, being the Met, gets nearly everything it requests.
That’s why so many of its exhibitions are close to incoherent. You never go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, and the Met, being in Manhattan, is greedy for more, more, more. The Vuitton Foundation is newer. Less is more. A Rothko painting from his classic period is seductive and intriguing. With so many, though, visitors tend to opt for a quickie. A 50-object exhibition would suit the art better. Rothko himself would have known this. His painting, he said, “was made in the scale of normal living, not institutional scale.” Rothko also said his art wasn’t “a picture of an experience but an Experience.” Given the size of the exhibition, an Experience is hard to have.
Rothko seems disingenuous when he claims he was never an abstract artist, but he also said, “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.” He’s right. Every work of art represents something, even if it’s a mood or a sensation, and even though a dozen people might each think it represents something different. Where Rothko himself and Mark Rothko err is in their conception of the artist as sui generis. He wasn’t. I look at Rothko as a modern painter, of course, but also as the great Romantic painter of his time, Romantic in terms of his expression of sublimity as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant understood it.
Awe, obscurity, melancholy, immensity, and poignancy, as well as the kind of tragedy, ecstasy, and doom Rothko had in mind, are the goals of Romantic painters from Géricault and Delacroix to Turner. Rothko is a wonderful tonalist, too, a description he’d hate. Whistler was not after awe or immensity or doom, but Rothko would be a liar if he said his art was unaffected by music, or that he, like Whistler, saw transcendence and not sentiment or narrative as goals of art. Rothko, in fact, would have agreed on the centrality of music and transcendence. He’s a great egotist, though. What he would have hated is the word “Whistler,” but Whistler is in the mix in the work of every great American artist who came after him.
In a piece of history-making, the Vuitton Foundation got two Rothko ensembles: the Seagram murals from 1959, now at the Tate in London, and three of the four pictures usually housed in the Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The two groups have never been lent before.
I’ve seen the Seagram pictures before. They’re enveloping, to be sure, but they were, up to that time, the darkest paintings he’d done. Philip Johnson persuaded Rothko to paint them for, of all places, the Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s new Seagram Building. Black and maroon, and all but one with vertical rather than horizontal rectangles, they’re moody and primitive, not in the handling of paint or in form but in mood. They’re entirely unsuited to a lunch of lobster thermidor and one, two, or three martinis, as Rothko eventually understood. Rothko kept them in his studio and gave them to the Tate. Rothko was very keen on European fame.
The four works in the Rothko Room weren’t painted for that specific space, which is where they’re usually shown. In 1957, Duncan Phillips exhibited Green and Maroon (1953) in a group show, bought two more Rothkos in 1960, and then a fourth in 1960. Then came the idea of dedicating a specific space to show the four works together and by themselves — thus was born the Rothko Room. Rothko often said that the ideal space for looking at his work was a chapel. He advised Phillips on how to display them. The Rothko Room is indeed chapel-sized, with a bench for people to sit and meditate. It’s the ideal way to present his work. It promotes close looking and contemplation. In this environment, his colors absorb the viewer, who slowly sees how luminescent they are. The beauty of Rothko is in how alchemic his paintings are. In absorbing us, the art becomes one with the viewer.
Duncan Phillips’s take on his own Rothkos is eloquent and moving. He’s the king among connoisseur collectors. “What we recall is not memories but old emotions disturbed or resolved, some sense of well being suddenly shrouded by a cloud . . . a drift of gray over an ambiance of rose, or the light when night descends.”
Clearly Phillips had the mystical, interior Experience that Rothko had imagined. I came close to it in the least-populated gallery of Mark Rothko, a space toward the end, when most visitors were exhausted, in which the paintings, from 1969, were black and gray, and where they’re displayed with sculptures by Giacometti. They’re from a 1969 commission from UNESCO that Rothko never finished because of his failing health. They’re the closest thing to archaicism, or a reach back to the days of the ancient Greeks, in Rothko’s work. I’m a sucker for the cool ambivalence of gray. It means stability, too, and calm and wisdom and concentration. And firm purpose. Rothko didn’t like the work of other artists to be near his, but, for this commission, he wanted Giacometti’s for its raw gravity and reach into the past.
Seeing three of the four Phillips pictures is, I suppose, good since it saves visitors a trip to D.C., to see the Phillips Collection, but it’s bad in that every loan involves risk. The Phillips took what might very well be its most important and valuable art and sent it on a plane to be displayed in a space visited by tens of thousands of strangers. Is it essential to the exhibition? No. There are dozens of other Rothkos there from the classic period. Could the Vuitton Foundation show happen without them? Yes, of course. I think the Tate was irresponsible, too, in lending its paintings. Rothko’s other ensemble, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, is inviolable.
It’s possible I’m a dinosaur, but I doubt it. Art is exposed to stress when it leaves museum walls to which it’s accustomed and where it’s happy. It’s deinstalled, handled, crated, trucked, stuck in a palette, and flown in a plane for hours, unloaded, trucked again, uncrated, hung on a strange wall for three months, and then the process goes into reverse. The Phillips ensemble probably has a market value of, say, $300 million, but, putting aside the money, accidents happen.
Barnett Newman, once Rothko’s close friend, said that Rothko told him that he thought about death whenever he looked at his own work. As for Newman, he looked at Rothko’s work and thought of the joy of life. As with the best art, and Rothko’s is certainly exquisite, Rothko’s paintings invite multiple meanings. Alas, Mark Rothko was too boisterous a setting. A huge audience was inevitable, and so many works make communion impossible. By emphasizing the artist’s considerable angst, the exhibition put a curatorial thumb on the interpretive scale. This is not to suggest that the Vuitton Foundation is never the place to see great art. Looking at its roster of exhibitions over the past ten years, I’d say the place is one of the best things to happen in the arts in Paris.
The catalogue is great. It’s not too much smaller than a Rothko painting and nearly square. More to the point, it’s sumptuously illustrated. A long essay by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, anchors it. Good essays at the end separately consider Rothko’s early work, his multiforms, his classic period, and his view of himself as an immigrant, among other topics. There’s a fantastic chronology that reprints primary documents. Among them is his “recipe of a work of art,” which he discussed in a 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. It shows a clear preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit, and hope, “10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.” Reading his comments alone makes me consider aspects of his work.
The Vuitton Foundation, which is always worth seeing, has exhibitions on Ellsworth Kelly and on Matisse’s Red Studio planned for the next few months. I hope to be back in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, which is slated for December.
