Rothko’s Rooms

Mark Rothko’s “multiforms” may seem deceptively simple at first glance. When I first discovered them at Tate Modern, I thought the same. They’re all just squares. But then I just couldn’t look away. And this is how my love with Mark Rothko began – with a canvas of colors that stopped my heart.

No. 13, 1949. MoMA NY

In Rothko’s hometown of Dvinsk, Russia, there was a forest of mass graves where the Cossacks buried the Jews they kidnapped and killed under czarist rule. Some critics have alluded that the rectangles in Rothko’s paintings are perhaps an echo of childhood horrors, but Rothko himself never gave any interpretations of his work.

To escape persecution, his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10. From first grade, he learned English, graduated high school in less than 9 years, and received a scholarship to Yale where he chose to major in Humanities.

Rothko’s art theories

And I think this is among the sadly unknown aspects about some artists, especially abstract. Like Wassily Kandinsky who trained in classical piano and cello at an early age, studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, became the chair professor of Roman Law, and later taught at Bauhaus University, one of the most influential schools in modern architecture and design. Like Max Ernst who also studied humanities and psychiatry at the University of Bonn, and afterwards founded the Dada group, in which Salvador Dali would later become part of. And like Alexander Calder who had a degree in mechanical engineering and invented the mobiles that hung over our cribs and mastered kinetic art.

That in contrast to people’s misconceptions of waywardly artists whose abstract works they think anyone can easily replicate, these pioneers of modern art were in fact brilliant men.

No 21, 1949; No 16, 1960; No. 3, 1953. The Met NY

Rothko’s earlier works were of still life and stylized figures. He painted similar to Cézanne and Picasso before finding his own style in the abstract expressionism that brought American art to the world. He studied philosophy, going back to Plato and Nietzsche, and had a keen sense of psychology. He learned from Freud and C. G. Jung the extraordinary powers of the unconscious and explored it. He would read and reread the Greek myths and tragedies all his life, a literary obsession that affected his mood and his art. And I love him most for that.

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944. MoMA NY

After leaving Yale, Rothko went to New York to study art under Arshile Gorky and Max Weber, an expressionist painter who, after studying under Matisse in Paris, brought Modernism to America. Weber emphasized the emotional power of art in his lessons. And this romantic idea – that art can move people – is something Rothko believed in and aspired to. In the galleries and museums of New York, he discovered Milton Avery and Paul Klee. He started filling his notebooks and began to exhibit his own work.

But having lived through world wars, the Holocaust, and atomic bombs, Rothko knew that painting flowers and reclining nudes can’t express the storm he felt inside. After seeing Matisse’s The Red Room, Rothko slowly turned his paintings into multiforms -blocks of colors like emotions, Rothko’s paintings were unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. They were haunting, original and unforgettable.

No 9, 1954; No 61, 1953; No. 46, 1957. MOCA LA

By the 1950’s, galleries and museums were buying up his paintings. Fortune magazine considered Rothko’s to be a good investment. In 1958, he was offered $35,000 for a series of murals to decorate the Four Seasons Restaurant of the new Seagram Building. It was the most any artist has ever been paid. It was the crowning achievement, giving validity to his work.

But it was also the kind of fame and fortune he scorned, the opposite of the solitude he loved in art. For the murals, he chose the deep red and black colors he saw in the Villa of the Mysteries in the ruins of Pompeii. He wanted shocking, brooding colors for New York’s aristocrats. But when he realized that his art would merely serve as decoration, he decided to give the money back and keep the murals.

Soon Rothko finally got the chance to control how his paintings would be exhibited. In 1960, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. devoted a space, the Rothko Room, for four of his paintings. In 1965, he was commissioned by art collectors John and Dominique de Menil for what would become the Rothko Chapel in Houston. And in 1966, the Tate Gallery planned for another Rothko Room to be inaugurated with the Seagram murals inside.

The Rothko Chapel, Houston

But Rothko would not live to see the last two completed. After an aneurysm that prevented him from working on large canvases, he sank deeper into depression. On February 25, 1970 – the same day, but just hours before the Seagram murals arrived at Tate – Rothko’s body was found on the floor of his studio. He had taken two bottles of barbiturates and slashed his wrists.

The pool of blood – a deep dark red the same hue he used in the Seagram murals – measured 8 by 6 feet, ironically like an artist’s canvas, his own death the culmination of his life’s work. Rothko always despaired over whether people understood the seriousness of his art, and like Arshile Gorky who hanged himself and Jackson Pollock who died in a suicidal car crash years before, his death gave that unmistakable gravity to his work.

I know that when some people look at one of Rothko’s paintings, all they see is a square. But I see Rothko – this enigmatic painter who found inspiration in the Greek tragedies and ancient ruins. I see Rothko haunted by the massacres of his childhood. I see Rothko who believed in the idealism of an art that can move people, stop your heart with the pure emotion of a canvas of color.

And I see Rothko meticulously drawing a line over each wrist and bleeding to death all alone, not knowing that his art forever hangs in these rooms.