O ver some forty-five years, Mark Rothko painted around 841 works on canvas and panel. At a first glance, my catalogue raisonné of this output numbers 834 entries. However, two paintings surfaced so close to its publication in 1998 that to change the entire numerical sequence after each addition was impossible (remember, this was just before everything went digital). Instead, I and the publishers decided to add an “a” to their respective catalogue numbers, making 836 in toto. Since then, only a very few undiscovered paintings have come to light. In the circumstances, I consider myself fortunate to have seen almost all of them – especially given that the corpus has long since dispersed across the globe from Seattle to Canberra, London to Tokyo, Madrid to Mexico City, and beyond. Why begin on a personal note with these facts and figures?
Of course, one answer is that the foregoing has been an extraordinary life experience. A second – from an objective historical standpoint and thus key for others – is that connoisseurship demands context. No single work is an island. Proper critical judgment requires not only studying a picture in the flesh but also knowing where it fits within the larger whole. On this score, Rothko’s No. 7 (1951) counts as a rare achievement.
No. 7 is rare for its manifest quality alone. Rare, too, from a practical perspective insofar as since the catalogue raisonné’s publication almost every major painting of comparable caliber has by now already come to auction. As such, No. 7 doubtless ranks as what the art trade calls a “trophy.” Yet be not fooled by whatever superficial or glitzy associations that word may carry. On the contrary, here Rothko attained the highest seriousness, an assurance evident from the image overall to its minutest details. No. 7 possesses – no matter how clichéd it might sound – the tell-tale hallmarks of a masterpiece.
By no coincidence, the text to my catalogue raisonné’s third and final section bears the phrase, “The Classic Years.” Its scope covers the period from 1951 until Rothko’s death in 1970. True, his style tended to change with each new decade. But these shifts took a year or two to gel. After a relatively realistic start in the 1920s, by the early 1930s Rothko veered toward an Expressionist manner exemplified in his New York subway scenes. Then around 1940 he stopped painting altogether, wrote a meditation on aesthetics, shortened his Russian name Marcus Rotkovitch and progressed to compositions inspired by ancient Greek mythology. These gradually morphed during the 1940s into the so-called “multiforms.”[1] When the new decade dawned, so did Rothko’s prowess as he reached the hypnotic, indelible imagery forever associated with his name. No. 7 epitomizes it in spades.
A short proviso is in order. Not every painting from 1950 exactly matches the “classic” idiom. Several retain a tinge of the “multiforms.” A rectangle may be somewhat skewed or a striking departure appears, such as the three horizontal lines scraped into the center in No. 5/No. 22 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Moreover, all twelve canvases that Rothko exhibited in the larger gallery at Betty Parsons in 1950 came from the year before.[2] Displaying Rothko’s truest classic manner had to await the next Parsons show (April 2–21, 1951). There, the artist presented himself at a zenith, his mature powers in full play. Unfortunately, no installation photographs comparable to those that Aaron Siskind took for the 1950 show exist. Nevertheless, my research based on gallery documents and so forth indicates that No. 7 hung in the main large room with equally stellar company. Rothko had found himself once and for all, finally attaining a goal that he and Adolph Gottlieb had proclaimed as early as 1943 in a letter to The New York Times: “the simple expression of the complex thought.”[3] In short, 1951 was an annus mirabilis – the artist in full flow, redolent with confidence.
“all of art is a portrait of an idea.”
Logic implies that the numerical order in which No. 7 took its place ran in a smooth sequence around the space from 1 to 8, suggesting that his pictorial intentions were exceptionally coherent.[4] If so, No. 7 must have stood, so to speak, alongside a soul mate, No. 6. First, the two works have almost identical dimensions, while their format is a type that Rothko especially favored in this phase – quite narrow yet tall. A reason may be that it conforms to a Western pictorial tradition, the full-length portrait. Should the comparison sound far-fetched, in the same year as their The New York Times letter, Rothko and Gottlieb did a radio broadcast. In this talk, the former said that “there is, however, a profound reason for the persistence of the word ‘portrait’ because the real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist’s eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions – in short, in the human drama.” He concluded: “all of art is a portrait of an idea.”[5] Without ideas there can be no “human drama.” In turn, Rothko later clarified what he meant by this existential phrase: "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”[6] His thought leads to the second quality that No. 7 shares with No. 6 and, indeed, the other six paintings in the big room at Parsons. Color.
As No. 6 looms vividly intense with its bright red and rich violet tones, so No. 7 feels a tad more subdued, though no less eloquent for this comparative reticence. On the contrary, facades – Rothko’s own noun for his tiered rectangular scrims – are by definition linked to restraint. To quote the artist, “Some painters want to tell all like at a confessional. I as a craftsman prefer to tell little.”[7] A key to such craft exists in a certain writer’s technique.
The writer in question is Ernest Hemingway (though he and Rothko were light-years apart in character). Based on his experience as a young journalist, Hemingway coined the term “Iceberg Theory” for a minimalist style that focused on surface elements without explicitly discussing the underlying themes, a manner involving repetition that allows the reader to fill the gaps left by the omissions. No better rationale describes Rothko’s strategies. With both the writer and the painter, little is stated, much is said. A spectator beholds Rothko’s surfaces while sensing his depths. Typically, in No. 7 tiny edgings to the main fields alert the gaze to whatever may lurk beneath. So does the subliminal shift in tonalities where the lowermost rectangle’s orange-crimson veil melts into a ground tinctured with a scarlet hint. Likewise, the creamy flesh pink that starts at the picture’s uppermost edges alters – by the stage it has descended to the lime yellow’s lower periphery – into the aforementioned scarlet. In a final perceptual twist, the last hue fleetingly re-emerges on the left streaking between the top and middle rectangles. This crafty changefulness meshes to a tee with the “Iceberg Theory.”
Much is happening under these surfaces, so delicate that, to recall Rothko’s word, they appear “breathed” onto the canvas. No wonder he once let his guard down, admonishing a fellow artist: “Look again, I am the most violent of all the new Americans. Behind the color lies the cataclysm.”[8] Although No. 6 resembles a strongly saturated reply to the bit more restrained No. 7 – the former’s violet modulated to pale lilac, its median eau-de-nil to lime yellow and burning red to a lighter ruddy glow – make no mistake. Tragedy, ecstasy, doom and kindred emotions can make their impact when spoken sotto voce as well as forte. A phrase beloved by connoisseurs of Burgundy’s wine springs to mind when facing these Rothkos: an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Image © 1995 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Art 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
No. 7 also holds its chromatic exuberance in Rothko’s trademark design, a tight grip. Frontal, proportioned with great calculation and hovering in space to engulf the spectator like a haze, these veils are nevertheless caught in an architectonic, rectangular vice. Its origin? The play between literal architecture and the human presence that had preoccupied Rothko from the early 1930s onward. Interior offers a prime example of this dramatic scenario – its shadowy figures enveloped by their rigid setting. The source? Michelangelo’s ominous Medici tomb. Rothko explained: “He [Michelangelo] makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.”[9] A taut framework arrests luscious colorism. Everything pivots on tension, which equates to evoking mood – Rothko’s veritable masterstroke. Among other forebears, Claude Monet proved that color captures mood and therefore time (emotions must have duration) in his various series.[10] As for moodiness, Rothko knew it well: “Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration – all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the quality of such moments.”[11] No. 7 radiates luminosity while concealing darker seasons of the spirit. Therein lies its quiet power.
[1] Although probably not Rothko’s own designation (and more likely the Marlborough Gallery’s choice), the word has been in use since at least the seventeenth century and is quite apt for the shifting forms in these paintings.
[2] For a reconstruction of the installation, see David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas – Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, D.C. & New Haven: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1998; sixth printing 2019), p. 26.
[3] “Rothko and Gottlieb’s letter to the editor, 1943”, in Miguel López-Remiro, ed., Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 36.
[4] Certain notable exceptions aside, the titular numbering to Rothko’s paintings tended to be erratic and even due to nothing more than happenstance.
[5] “‘The Portrait and the Modern Artist,’ by Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, October13, 1943, in López-Remiro 2006, p. 38.
[6] Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1957), p. 93.
[7] Rothko, “Address to Pratt Institute, November [sic] 1958”, in López-Remiro 2006, p. 126.
[8] Rothko (1959), in Chris Stephens, Mark Rothko in Cornwall (St Ives: Tate Gallery St Ives, 1996), p. 10.
[9] ‘“John Fischer, "The Easy Chair, Mark Rothko: Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man,’ 1970”, in López-Remiro 2006, p. 130.
[10] Rothko’s familiarity with Monet is evident in his early manuscript. See Christopher Rothko, ed., The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art – Mark Rothko (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 38, 40, 42 and 128. In Rothko’s notebooks a word that meshes with Monet’s aims to capture a moment in time recurs: “the instant”. Also, Rothko could have seen the Nymphéas while in Paris in 1950.
[11] David Sylvester, “The Ugly Duckling”, in Michael Auping, Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (Buffalo & New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Harry N. Abrams, 1987), p. 140.
