Mark Rothko

Rothko was born in Russia in 1900, but made his career as an artist in New York, breaking the mould with a series of innovative abstract paintings.

A Rothko painting (I intend his work in the mature style, from 1949 onwards) is not a painting of anything. It illustrates nothing. It consists of a few rectangular blocks of colour, laid one above another on the canvass, surrounded by a differently coloured frame.

There are no elements you can name: no mountains, trees, towns or people. There are only the visual elements of colour and form, and even these cannot properly be named, for Rothko’s reds are never simply red, but complexes of colours which have no name, and his rectangles are never simply rectangles, but complex shapes which have neither name nor mathematical formula. Rothko did not even title his mature paintings. He simply numbered them, and the titles some of them now bear were added by collectors.

The majority of the paintings are very large. Rothko wanted them hung close to the ground and viewed from up close, and he painted to the outer edge of the frame. The effect is that you do not see a framed and titled painting, hanging out there on the art gallery wall as one object among many in your field of vision. Instead you are immersed in a single image which spans the field of vision and consumes the intimate space of the eye. You are looking at the elements of vision — colour and form — at their purest. You are confronting vision itself.

Yellow over Purple

Rothko’s painting Yellow over Purple (shown below) is composed roughly speaking of a block of yellow colour above a block of red and purple colour, both held in an orange frame. On the face of it, nothing is represented in the picture beyond forms and colours, and Rothko himself said that he was not painting things but painting vision. Yet Rothko also insisted that his work was not about colour or form, but about “basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy and so on.” And there are those who have stood before one of these immense images and wept. But how can Rothko deal in these grand themes using only a couple of blocks of colour?

The blocks

Let us return to the blog post Infinite Eye, where we discussed the three infinities of the image: infinity of depth, infinity of breadth, and infinity of the divided whole. How do these appear in Rothko’s painting?

Rothko worked with paint heavily diluted by turpentine, so the colour stained the canvas only weakly. This thin paint he applied in wash after wash, allowing the earlier washes to show through the later ones. The complex of layers draws the eye into the infinity of each block’s depth, as every part of the block contains its own sub-parts, down to and pointing beyond the limit of resolution of the eye. And Rothko dramatises the infinity of breadth, using the elements of surface and show-through colour to set up an infinity of forms, paths and patterns between and across the diverse elements of each block of colour. In respect of the infinity of the divided whole, the eye seeks a stable grip on each block as a unit, oscillating between grasping the block as a single block (a yellow block, a red block) and the boiling, swarming elements of surface and show-through colour which both constitute the block and constantly deny its integrity.

This dramatisation of infinities creates a powerful “other”. The block is wholly inside our field of vision. It is intimately part of us. And yet it is out there, independent, an “other” which glares back at us and holds us in its alien grip. The fundamental shock of a Rothko is in this startling infinite other, from which no figurative narrative is there to distract us.

Colouring infinities

But what is the difference between the yellow block and the red block? Beyond the shock-of-the-infinite shared by both, what might be the further significance of each block in terms of the basic human emotions Rothko sought to paint?

First, here is my personal response to the yellow block …

“The yellow block is divine giving, the bottomless creation of the god who sits in the centre of the sun, drowned in the blaze of his glory. Brazen and brass, the trumpets of god’s angels hurt the eyes.”

Now your subjective response may be different from my response. But any semantics brought to bear on the blocks of colour will be super-charged by the infinities (of depth, breadth and divided whole) objectively present in the image. So following my own response above, in the yellow block is infinity as inexhaustible, as outpouring, as therefore constantly giving. Also infinity as dazzling, baffling, impossible to see clearly. Also infinity as concealing in the depths. So the structure of glory and the structure of infinity (in this certain perspective) are the same. The yellow block summons both the idea of glory, and the related perspective of infinity-as-outpouring, infinity-as-dazzling, infinity-as-concealing. This is not arbitrary semantics. The association of the yellow block with glory may be physiological or cultural or individual to myself: the structure of glory inherent in infinity is not.

Now the red block. …

“The red block conceals a story, a tragedy — done, and now inaccessible save for its still-visible traces in bloodstain and bruising. Muted drums sound. Grief follows violence.”

In the red block is infinity as absence, as irrecoverable loss that no amount of seeking can find again. Also infinity as endless signs, paths and traces on the surface. Also infinity as constantly recreating need, welling up, ever-freshening. Once again the red block summons both the idea of grief, and the related perspective of infinity-as-loss, infinity-as-trace, infinity-as-fresh. Once again the associations of the block may be subjective, but the structure of grief inherent in infinity is not.

In one block the infinite “other” becomes glory, in another grief — and in this same moment glory and grief acquire infinite depth, and infinite breadth, and an infinite complexity of identity. The power of the painting then is driven through the infinities of the continuous plane and the infinities of human emotions, which correspond point-by-point with those of the plane — this power then being shifted to one emotion or another through the semantics of colour and through Rothko’s technique.

The frame

The painting as a whole frames two blocks. The frame contains a single picture, and so is a whole. But this whole contains two quite different blocks. These are in a relationship, and so in harmony with each other, as regards tone, size, position and colour semantics; but they are also divergent, and so are dissonant from each other, in these same respects of tone, size, position and colour semantics. Moreover each block is itself an infinity, so that the relationship between them is between two unstable entities.

There is a great contrast between the microcosm of the block and the macrocosm of the frame. The block is turbulent, boiling. The frame is stable, serene. In the block the infinities of depth and breadth are to the fore, in the frame the infinity of part / whole. The frame invites the eye to make a whole of the two blocks — to see not two separate images, one of glory and one of grief, but a single image of glory-plus-grief. But glory is not grief, and in any possible understanding of the image ( “glory triumphs over grief”, or “grief gives the lie to glory”) the ineluctable difference between grief and glory will persist, just as the two will continue to be bound by the frame into a single image which demands to be taken as a balanced whole.

The divided and the undivided mind

Yellow over Purple with its infinity of infinities defeats analysis. It glares back at us. It baffles us. It is in us and yet it stands away from us. It doubles us as seeker and sought in the heart of our intimate self. Yet it is also true that the power of vision grasps all this — the endless depth, the endless breadth, the divided wholes. Vision sees every part without seeing any part. It grasps every path without following any path. It grasps the whole without breaking it into parts, and the parts without constructing a whole. The divided mind and the undivided mind embrace each other.