Why was the blind pulled down?
Ian Dunlop
MARK ROTHKO by David Anfam Yale, £95, pp. 708 Had Mark Rothko ended his life in 1949 as opposed to 1970 he might be remembered as a minor symbolist painter with leanings towards abstraction. He would not have achieved the status he has today as one of America's greatest painters, and he certainly would not have been given the star treatment of a massive catalogue like this sumptuous volume by David Anfam, which has been published to the highest standards. On the basis of the early paintings reproduced here, when he still used his birth name, Marcus Rothkowitz, an art teacher might have been tempted to advise the struggling artist to try something else. He appeared to be unable to draw, his sense of form was clum- sy and his colour is muddy and uninspired. But by the end of the 1940s he had trans- formed himself into a painter of great sen- sitivity with a subtle feeling for colour and a light touch, even on large mural-sized canvases.
How did he do it? Was it the environ- ment of New York in the 1940s which saw the emergence of so many great painters, the best known being Pollock, de Kooning, Still and Newman? Or did it come from within? Were the seeds of his magisterial and beautiful paintings sown in the early work and in the painter's tortured psyche? David Anfam may provide the answer in his densely written introduction, but the text is hard going. He is perhaps right to avoid the many repeated anecdotes about the New York School, which has been well covered by Dore Ashton and others, but while good at describing the painter's tech- nique, he is not so good at getting inside the artist's head and is apt to rely on other writer's words to describe key changes in style. When I read references to the Ger- `Entrance to subway; 1938 man Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, the American poet Wallace Stevens and the film director Michelangelo Antonioni in the space of two paragraphs, I for one lost the plot.
Many will, like me, prefer to skip the text and turn to the reproductions which convey better than words Rothko's progress as he moved from the glorious paintings of the 1950s — mainly reds, pinks and oranges, with the occasional blues and greens — to the darker brown and maroon paintings of the 1960s, before ending in the black-on- grey paintings done just before his suicide in 1970.
What went wrong? Had he reached an impasse? Was he frightened of repeating himself? Did the burden of 'spirituality' encouraged by such commissions as the Rothko Chapel in Houston drain him of creativity? Or was he suffering from a long- term form of depression made acute by the split from his wife and his aortic aneurysm?
Again David Anfam provides no answer but resorts to metaphor. He compares the last paintings to someone pulling down the blind and then draws attention to an early poem by Rothko and its similarities to the Platonic myth of the prisoners in a cave who see only shadows when they look one way and blinding light when they look out of the cave at the sun.
To be fair to the author, these questions are perhaps unanswerable. It is hard to describe the mysterious beauty of Rothko's great paintings of the 1950s or the change of mood which took place in the 1960s. My own feeling is that success got the better of him. In 1954 in a letter to a curator Rothko wrote:
Since my pictures are large, colourful and unframed, and since museum walls are usual- ly immense and formidable, there is the dan- ger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted on a scale of normal living rather than an insti- tutional scale.
But by the end of the 1950s he accepted two major commissions, a set of paintings for the Seagram building which are now in the Tate Gallery and the set made for the Chapel in Houston. It miy be sacrilegious to say so, but in both cases the building seems to swamp the paintings and the spec- tator has to read more into these works than the paintings themselves give out.
Who will buy this book? Not those wish- ing to know more about Rothko's life and career. It lacks a chronology of the artist's life and it does not attempt to distinguish between his best paintings and his failures. But while it is not a critical work, it will be immensely useful to museums, libraries, dealers, collectors and other artists, and considering the amount of care that has gone into the preparation of this catalogue and the quality of the reproductions, at £95 it is good value.
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