Intergalactic Explorer

"Unknown adventures in an unknown space"

            Artist Mark Rothko would sometimes show people the scar on the tip of his nose. One of his earliest childhood memories was being carried in his mother's arms. Suddenly, a Cossack thundered past on his horse. He slashed wildly at them, the tip of his whip just catching the toddler's face.

            "Kill the Jews to Save Russia" read signs in Dvinsk, the town where his family lived.  Most Jews there lived in poverty working 14-hours a day in factories. Rothko was born in 1903, and two years later, pogroms in nearby towns killed thousands. Though no Jews in Dvinsk died, Jews lived under martial law."

            Rothko's father was politically active and an Orthodox Jew. When his son was five, he enrolled him in a religious school so he could memorize the Talmud. A deep spirituality would stay with him all his days. Two years later, hisfamily emigrated to America. His father died six months later.

            Rothko spent the rest of his life reliving those fearful times through his art, almost as though he were trying—but never succeeding—to exorcise them. He said he saw pits dug in the forests where Cossacks buried Jews they had kidnapped and murdered. Historians agree he would have been much too young to have seen such things but instead must have heard stories about such grim events.

‘Black in Deep Red’

            Whatever the truth, critics think Rothko was haunted by these rectangular maws—dark open wounds in the earth, explaining why his best-known works are rectangular and large enough to fall into. By repeating the format over and over, it was as if he were saying again and again to viewers, "See! Look at what I suffered! Feel! Experience what I experienced!"

            His 45-year career saw him first paint as Realist and Surrealist. In the 1930s and 1940s his work was a riot of archetypal images conveying pain, passion, and violence—a reflection of the times. Starting in 1948, he ascended to his mature period with his 'color field' paintings. These massive unframed works are shimmering windows to the infinite. They have deceptively banal titles like 'Black in Deep Red,' 'Untitled (Black and Orange on Red), 'Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red),' and 'No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray).'

            Lozenges of fog, sometimes divided by bright bands that crackle with energy, they contain no images, no symbols, only colors. They radiate. They blush. They burn. Some of these paintings evoke joy. Some feel sad. They almost feel alive. All overwhelm.

            How did he do it? He worked on specially prepared canvases and applied many layers of paint laid down so the finished works feel both deep and transparent. That Rothko had been a set designer accustomed to working on a large scale helped, too, as did secret ingredients in the paint such as tomato soup and beet juice.

“Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom”

            "Euphoric veils of diaphanous color" is how the Guggenheim describes his work. "You can fly through" a Rothko, wrote Tom Wolfe. "Look at that "airy" quality, those "areas floating in space," those cloud formations, all that "illusionistic space" with its evocations of intergalactic travel."

            "Unknown adventures in an unknown space" is how Rothko described his art. Indeed, he hurled himself into orbit and beyond before any astronaut got there.

            He denied he was an Abstract Expressionist. "My work is not abstract," he said. "It lives and breathes." And he added: "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."

            Rothko believed that viewing his work should be a spiritual experience. Deeply concerned with how his work was exhibited, he insisted that the lighting and other conditions help viewers feel joy, awe, mystery, and dread.
            His paintings have been known to make people cry. It was as though they caused some viewers to be engulfed, overwhelmed, and gripped in their deepest, most profound emotions. "The people who weep before my pictures," said Rothko, "are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."

MORAL: You don't need a priest for
an exorcism to be performed.

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