How Did Rothko Seek to Transcend the Visible World?

Having evolved in his oeuvre from figuration through Surrealism, Rothko arrived at his mature style in the late 1940s. This article will examine the significance and meaning of his late so-called “Abstract Expressionist” work. It will also ask whether language is up to the task of discussing Rothko, given his own skepticism and evasion of it. Finally, it will look at the ideas of several thinkers in relation to this enigmatic and controversial painter.

What are we to make of abstract art? Can anything be made of it? As many accusations as praises have been leveled at this kind of art throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Some assert that, because it does not depict the world, it is meaningless. Others say it is elitist and hermetic, hiding its “content” or even its emptiness from the examinations of the viewer. Abstract art certainly does not “depict” things in the sense of painting a picture of the world. But to generalize the term “abstraction” only adds to the confusion. There were and are painters who have been subsumed under the category of “abstract art” that had wildly varying intentions, and different methods and processes. The catch-all term “abstraction” fails to capture the specificity and variations between these artists and between their works.

Abstract Expressionism was a canonical movement of the mid-20th century that emerged in America; Mark Rothko (1903-70) was one of its pioneers. A Latvian-born painter whose enigmatic compositions of the 1940s and 1950s his work came to be seen as the epitome of the new movement.

But even the term “Abstract Expressionist” is inadequate when speaking of Rothko who himself rejected this description of his work. He even rejected the moniker “abstract” as misleading, citing a concern with a reality that exists beyond the physical and therefore an art that is inextricable from nature, rather than a removal from it: “I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It’s really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.” In this quote, there is disaffection with concern for the entire corpus of artistic tradition and with the perceived atomization of the individual in the Western consumerist society of the mid-20th century.

Having evolved an aesthetic in his work that traversed through several periods including expressionist distortion of forms, Surrealism, and a “multiform” phase through the 1940s, Rothko arrived at his mature style by the late 1940s. For the artist, this mature phase went beyond the aesthetic, which he felt to be concerned with artistic innovation and a consciousness of the tradition as well as current developments. These works present what Rothko called a “human drama” of usually tragic implications, given the inevitable fact of human mortality. Aesthetics, when understood as the pursuit of the beautiful in art, was also irrelevant to these later works. Rothko’s aim was not the beautiful but rather the truth of spiritual experience.

As for the charges of elitism and hermeticism, these cannot be issued against Rothko, or at least at his intentions. The paintings were intended as presences with which the viewer was to interact with empathy and openness. In this they are social.

Despite Rothko’s obvious stripping away of many pictorial conventions such as the creation of an illusionistic space, the depictions of figures and objects, and the relation between figure and ground, some conventions that seek to overcome cultural differences are adhered to by Rothko. These include the use of brooding dark hues and black to symbolize mortality and the tragic awareness of it. Also, the works show rudimentary but evanescent shapes or fields of color that seem to blend and move. What Rothko explicitly wanted to do was to create a space in which to emote in the act of painting and, in the reception of the viewer, to provoke “basic human emotions.”

Stanley Kunitz, a poet and close friend of the artist, called Rothko a “shaman” and a “primitive,” a producer of great art which, according to Kunitz, had its origins in magic and was inherently ethical and spiritual. While these words are not Rothko’s, the disposal of traditional conventions in his art does signal a desire to return to the beginnings of human expression and he himself referred to the spiritual as the prime goal of his work.

By the mid-20th century, there was a trend in literary criticism and art that prioritized the artwork in itself over the so-called “heresy of paraphrase,” — the mutilation of the artwork by the description of it which could only deceive. From Russian Formalism to English New Criticism, the idea that the language of criticism and analysis was insufficient gained traction in the United States. Most of the so-called Abstract Expressionists subscribed to this notion, from the painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to the sculptor David Smith — and Mark Rothko shared this sentiment.

Most observers of the works of Abstract Expressionists declare them uninterpretable — including both supporters and detractors alike. As interpretation is the preserve of the linguistic, it has been held by many to be incommensurable with other art forms. Writing later, Jean-François Lyotard opined that the verbalization of music or art amounts to mere ideology and that the true artistic experience is inaccessible to words.

In Rothko’s late work, the failure of language is inevitable and to be desired. Just as his abstraction negates or rather makes redundant the figurative, the objects of the visible world, and even the symbolism and myth with which he was earlier concerned, so too does the late Rothko evoke the insufficiency of words and description, as they have as referents the objects and concepts of the physical world that he is trying to go beyond. The self-defeating project of the literary when applied to Rothko’s visual art is evident.

Description, with its implications of paraphrasing, categorization, division, and comparison, is antithetical to Rothko’s own project which sought a universal sublimity that casts off the shackles of words. As he said, the paintings are to be experienced as pure “presences” and they are to live as organic forms. As such, they are not subject to the delimiting demands of description. They also embody a resistance to pictorialization in the sense of making a picture that represents a narrative, figures, and objects. To do this would be to, in the case of narrative, yield to the literary, and in the case of the figure and the object, to be constrained by the physical.

The contemporary sculptor David Smith was associated with the Abstract Expressionists, and he spoke of his art as a “return to origins, before purities were befouled by words.” This hostility to or doubt about the capabilities of language was widespread among many Modernist practitioners. Rothko was no different, saying that explanation causes “paralysis of the mind and imagination.”

If, as Rothko says, the explanation of his work by the himself causes paralysis, that must also be true of the exegesis of the critic or interpreter who is not only at a remove from the artistic intention, but also, and more grievously for Rothko, in a state of necessary incomprehension by virtue of their use of language.

If Rothko meant that the paralysis would be incurred by the viewer of the work, whom he saw as a partner in the experience, he could have meant that his explanations would install preconceptions in the mind of the viewer with whom he wanted to share freedom, that avoids reintroducing a linguistic limitation.

For many of the Abstract Expressionists in America after the Second World War, the impetus to discover a new visuality was not only an aesthetic emergency but a political one. Illusionistic Realism was sponsored by the Nazi and the Soviet regimes as an official style and thereby came to be associated with propaganda, deceit, and totalitarianism. Art historian Ann Gibson notes that even the Social Realism of many American painters was seen to be tinged with an opposing propagandistic significance.

Rothko developed a horror at a categorizable and particularized meaning being applied to his art, either by him or others. For him, the autonomy of the viewer was of enormous importance as it was for the Abstract Expressionists by and large. Yet, this autonomy of reception was not complete, as the viewer’s experience was necessarily tied to the evocations in the paintings.

The poverty of the linguistic, that is asserted by Rothko and evinced by the silent and silencing “presences” of the paintings of his late period, makes the works “unwritable” and “uninterpretable.” The fact that many of them are untitled or only refer to the colors in the titles compounds the avoidance of the perceived corruption of language and could even signal a quasi-musical thematic of color and shape interactions.

What is not at stake in these often brooding and delicately blended and shifting forms is determinable meaning that can answer in prosaic language what is asked of it. But that is not to say that there is communication in them. While neither specific themes, narratives, figures, nor objects are represented, the fact of the canvas, its colors, and the moods with which we associate color is incontestable yet indefinable.

Despite this failure, what language can do is criticize, analyze, and contextualize art, language being endemic to these pursuits. But of course, language cannot articulate the work of Rothko, nor arguably any work of visual art. Even the texts called ekphrasis that were employed to describe visual works during the Renaissance fell short of comprehensiveness, unable to relay effects or response in a totalizing description which by its nature is limited and therefore limiting.

This is even truer for abstract painting, yet the tools of description, the analysis of relationships, and the tracing of an evolution between works can be applied to serve our understanding. Rothko’s paintings stand in self-evidence, however; they can’t ever be described exhaustively but can only be minimally indexed.

The artist himself, opposed as he was to the imposition of the literary and the verbal onto his work, did succumb to making certain statements on it, although these statements were rare and sparse. What we know from his explicit words, however, is that Rothko felt constricted by the American society of his time, which he thought hostile to the artist as a “lever of true liberation.” His thought in 1947—when he was on the cusp of his mature style—was that the “transcendental” experience which he felt to be the mission of art was marginalized by an increasingly consumerist society. He concluded that his mission could only be achieved after the security and community of the familiar were abandoned.

All preconceptions were to be dispensed with as so many obstacles to authenticity. These preconceptions he characterized as “the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur” as a prelude to both his process and the viewer’s reception.

Of the paintings themselves, Rothko stated: “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers” and, being even more explicit, he said that his shapes are unique and organic “with volition and a passion for self-assertion,” entailing no association with the visible world which is comprised of “finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.”

For Rothko, there are two tragic circumstances. The first, which is to be overcome, is the modern tragedy of the loss of the transcendental and a resultant “human incommunicability.” The second is the tragic nature of being: human mortality. This is both affirmed and negated in his paintings, as the undeniable fact of existence yet his seemingly limitless organic spaces were intended to furnish an encounter with a spiritual eternity capable of being intuited.

The late paintings were meant to commune with this boundless spirituality and to communicate it, attempting a social direction for the transcendental experience. What is intended is a kind of midwifery of immanent spirit that is rendered as a nebulous apparition that envelopes the viewer, with Rothko even recommending a viewing distance of 18 inches from his canvases. This was to culminate in the physical encirclement of the viewer by the paintings at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

Despite the contention that Rothko’s art is forbiddingly elitist, difficult, or vacuous, he wanted his works to tend to universality. He wanted “an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”

The paintings are abstract in the narrow sense of not depicting the visible world and, therefore, are not factual or narrative. Yet they are intended to be meaningful. What Rothko was attempting to evoke was pure presence and the transcendent. Equally, the symbol, even the multivocal symbol that refers to a complex of things, is bound to language. Hence, Rothko does not represent things even allusively but records his “basic human emotions” as directly as possible through the attenuated intermediary of the convergence of shape and color.

However, the paintings are not mere relics of his emotions but point beyond themselves in two ways. The first enjoins the engagement of his ideal “sensitive” viewer who is to interact with the works as with a person: “[a] picture lives by companionship…”

The second way in which the paintings point beyond themselves is in an attempt at an alchemy of the human soul. The matter-of-fact materials of the canvas and paints are transformed through the act of painting into an encompassing space that refuses definition, strains against it — and almost spills over its frame. Just as Rothko’s materials are transformed into this space of varying luminosities, the finite and mortal state of the artist and viewer is overcome—or intended to be—by the earnest investment in the experience.

From the 1930s onwards, Clement Greenberg was an important if not the most important theorist of High Modernist art. His influence dominated the art criticism of the mid-century and because of this, his ideas ossified into orthodoxy. However, this does not invalidate these ideas but rather attests to their prevalence and insight. Greenberg was an anti-intentionalist when it came to the study of art, especially painting. His focus was only on the completed artifact of the painting.

Yet, though Rothko was terse in his rare statements, he did refer to his intention to express “basic human emotions.” In this way, he differed from the contention of High Modernists like Greenberg that the artwork was of sole interest without reference to intention. Greenberg further wrote that “all paintings of Quality ask to be looked at rather than read.” Rothko certainly shared the critic’s revulsion at the imposition of the literary onto the painting, but in his late work, his paintings ask not only to be looked at but to engage with or absorb the observer, and to eradicate the distance implied by Greenberg’s pure looking.

Equally, there are similarities and differences between Rothko and an important existentialist theory of the site of meaning. The thinker Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that an artwork’s meaning cannot be encapsulated by the intentions of the artist. In fact, Sartre held that the meaning of an artwork is the preservation of the spectator whose relation to the artwork was, therefore, of primary importance. The existentialist insistence on the viewer as the responsible arbiter is relevant to Rothko, whose paintings are, in addition to records of his confrontations with the sublime and the otherworldly, invitations extending to the receptive viewer—his ideal “sensitive” observer—to partake in the experience.

But, while Sartre maintains the crucial importance of meaning-formation as the task of the viewer, Rothko’s later works could be seen as more interactive and egalitarian in that they are equally the remnants of his own experience and this invitation. Rothko’s viewer is simultaneously a spectator and a responsorial confidante.

In 1948, Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman stated that European art had failed to achieve the sublime because of its “blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation.” This is apt of Rothko’s sentiments as displayed in his work. While there is no figurative content of “sensation,” or even conceptual content—as that would require language—there is an energy and impetus in Rothko’s “color fields” toward an unnameable sense of the sublime.

Using a musical metaphor that seems appropriate, the art historian E.H. Gombrich wrote of expression in art: “It is not the chord, but the choice of a chord within an organised medium to which we so respond.” Rothko endlessly and subtly modulated his tones within and between works. He used bright colors, like greens and reds, and made contrasts of dark and light. Later, he made more nuanced studies of darker hues which showed wide variety, to the point where abruptness was only supplied by the stark reality of the frame’s containment of his oceanic vision. The frames mark the border between the world around us and the spiritual realm, but also the threshold, as Rothko hoped, between the sensibility of the artist and that of the viewer.

Claude Cernuschi has written that the spectator of a Rothko was to reconstruct its combination of elements: “The relationships are not so much on the canvas but in the spectator’s mind.” This is an observation that has been also made of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, their juxtaposition of colors being mixed by the perception of them. Monet, for example, paid nominal attention to objects for the sake of the light and color effects upon them.

For Rothko, though, the canvas and paint shared a sole objecthood in his work, which was to be overcome through the pure evocation of human emotions through color. Indeed, Rothko too cited the primacy of light — that it was the purpose of his color, literally saying: “it’s not color, it’s light.”

In his important 1952 essay The American Action Painters, Harold Rosenberg cites the “non-objecthood” of both the action paintings and their representations, or rather lack of representation: “the act itself is the object…The painting is only a ghost.” However, as plausible as this is of many “action painters” like Jackson Pollock, it doesn’t tally with Rothko’s process or intention.

For Rothko, the act of painting was certainly important as an attempted memorialization of a felt emotional encounter with the sublime. Yet, his act is less the end or “object” and more the beginning of a process of open-ended record that is to spur a communion on the part of the viewer whose own encounter is double: both with the work as a deliverance of the sensibility from the mundane, and with their own experience of the transcendent. This latter encounter is often provoked in the context of the tragic sense of mortality in the darker works toward which Rothko gravitated in his late period. These works are not merely retrospective “ghosts” of the act of painting but pure presences that look forward to engagement.

Where Rosenberg and Rothko could be seen to converge, though, is in Rosenberg’s view of the modern artwork as transitional “to the further side of the object and the outer spaces of consciousness,” as Rosenberg puts it. Rosenberg’s view of the act of painting translates as “the psychologically given into the intentional, into ‘a world’ – and transcending it” — most apt when looking at Rothko’s late works and pronouncements on them. For him, the “psychologically given” is everyday existence in the visible world.

Jeffrey Weiss has seen in Rothko’s paintings a sense of a “double nihilation” that he derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of nothingness. The double absence consists of, according to Sartre, the absent figure being experienced as presence, “or the apprehension of nothingness, and plenitude is experienced as ground.” Weiss applies this to Rothko, noting the latter’s manipulations of “figure” and “ground,” or center and edge. But this is to undermine at least Rothko’s intentions, and probably the visual evidence of his paintings. The figure-ground relation is irrelevant to Rothko’s pictures. It is not only the figure that is absent but its relation to the ground which itself is absent. However, conceptually speaking, the entire painting can be seen as a “ground” for the observer’s spiritual experience, and also as the “figure,” or quasi-subjective presence, that provokes this experience.

The application of the Sartrean sense of nothingness to Rothko’s art seems a procrustean and arbitrary act. While Rothko does renounce the physical world and thereby figuration, Sartre’s nothingness implies a negation of being. Rothko does not renounce being, he merely renounces the appearances of the seen world in order to evoke pure being unburdened by figures and the objects that partake of it.

In this, he is closer to being a Platonist than an existentialist. Sartre establishes a process whereby being is negatived to result in nothingness, but Rothko negates the physical aspect of being to produce communion with something that is spiritually real while intangible. More broadly, both Rothko and Sartre share an obsessive concern with authenticity.

For Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, the Rothko of the 1950s and onwards “began to subvert the readability of forms,” an enterprise that would culminate in the Rothko Chapel. This view is not contestable. Bersani and Dutoit ascribe a resultant lack of necessity for visibility, a sort of blindness. That visibility being made unnecessary is arguable but, far from this inducing a blindness, visibility is superseded by a pursuit of the visionary which is conveyed by the painter’s seemingly infinite formlessness that denotes eternity and sublimity.

Rothko in the 1950s was a “return to the moment of looking” and renewed the “possibility that presence might not take place,” according to Bersani and Dutoit who designate him “retrogressive.” But presence is in these paintings which Rothko argues are composed of “organic” and “volitional” shapes. These move and grow during the act of viewing. Bersani and Dutoit seem to see presence as the depiction of figural forms — a traditional concept that is inapplicable to the artist’s aims. Rather than a “retrogressive” return to the moment of looking, in Rothko, there is a disbandment of looking in the sense of looking for (a form, a figure) but there is a sense of looking beyond these. Looking for an object implies the isolated experience of the eye, while in Rothko’s work, the aim was to engender a more holistic experience of the organic presences the paintings (dis-)embody.

Bibliography

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000.