Mark Rothko

Estate of the artist (estate no. 3057.46)
Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York (acquired from the above by 1970)
Estate of the artist (acquired from the above by 1977)
Pace Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in June 1981

New York, Betty Parsons Gallery, Mark Rothko: Recent Paintings, March 1948 (titled No. 8)
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Houston, Museum of Fine Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mark Rothko, 1903 – 1970, October 1978 – September 1979, cat. no. 54, illustrated (titled Figure in Archaic Sea; illustration inverted)
New York, Pace Gallery, Mark Rothko: The Surrealist Years, April - May 1981, p. 37, illustrated

Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted”, Possibilities 1, Winter 1947-48, p. 93, illustrated
William C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, Cambridge, Ma., 1983, pl. no. 212, illustrated (titled Figure in Archaic Sea)
Marc Glimcher, ed., The Art of Mark Rothko: Into an Unknown World, New York, 1991, pl. no. 8, p. 35, illustrated in color
David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, 1998, cat. no. 309, p. 253, illustrated in color
Mildred Glimcher, ed., Adventures in Art: 40 Years at Pace, New York, 2001, p. 229, illustrated in color

This painting has been requested for the exhibition, Mark Rothko and Italy, being curated by Oliver Wick for the Palazzo delle Espiozioni in Rome from October 5, 2007 to January 6, 2008.

 
In a July 8^th, 1945 letter to the The New York Times, Rothko explained his allegiance to a group of artists he called the “Mythmakers”, which included Gorky, Pollock, Gottlieb, Baziotes and others, who had turned to mythology and the art of primitive cultures as inspiration for their work. Rothko, always articulate in describing his sources and creative process, explained that myths “are eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man’s primitive fears and motivations…and modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life.” (Ibid., p. 2X). Deeply influenced by the art of the Surrealists in exile, and reacting to the horrors of World War II raging in Europe, Rothko and the other artists turned to what Freud described in his 1939 Moses and Monotheism as our “archaic inheritance” in drawing inspiration from mythological sources ranging from Navajo Indian deities (Pollock’s Moon Woman of 1942) to Greek mythology (Gottlieb’s Persephone of 1942) in search of a universally shared artistic root. It was these works and this period that saw the birth of the New York School, the ascendance of New York as the new capital of avant-garde art and the forging of the Abstract Expressionist style.

No. 8 (Figure in Archaic Sea) is a masterpiece of Rothko’s mythological period. Apparently standing on the shore of the Aegean, this figure has suffered, to quote from The Tempest, one of Rothko’s favorite Shakespearian plays, a “sea-change / Into something rich and strange”. Refracted through Rothko’s prismatic mind, the figure is a rhythmic flurry of sketched lines and primary colors – as if moving or dancing – and is framed by a temple. The beginning of an arcade of Doric columns is visible on the left, with deeply recessed spaces behind the central personage, and glimpses of the pale blue sea beyond. The columns support a thick entablature and pediment, stretching across and mingling with the dancing figure. Rothko primed the canvas with a thick layer of off-white. He then laid the color over it with a dry brush, spreading the paint unevenly, suggesting the weathered and eroded stone surfaces of antiquity. We can sense the dry salty heat, emanating from the sun above, depicted with the same deep, aureate yellow that glows warmly in so many of the later color field paintings by Rothko. The canvas is divided into rectangular areas – gray sky, blue sea and gray beach – further anticipating the artist’s later works.

Possibly the single most important book to contribute to Rothko’s aesthetic vision, and which he quoted constantly, was Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music). Rothko shared the young Nietzsche’s fascination with ancient Greek tragedy as a representation of humanity’s most profound and unchanging fears and concerns: vengeance, religion, murder, retribution, fate, love, incest, beauty and war. It is difficult not to see in the energy of the figure in this painting a representation of the vital Dionysian, with the temple behind standing for the controlled Apollonian ideal. Architecture, with its ratios and ordered symmetries, is the embodiment of the Apollonian which in the words of Nietzsche, “rose to the austere majesty of Doric Art and the Doric view of the world” (The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music), Chapter 2) while dance and music are the embodiment of Dionysian, or liberated physicality, of the human body itself as art. In Nietzsche’s vision, the Apollonian and the Dionysian remain in constant struggle, but in constant interdependence, similar to the double-faced Janus-like profiles in some of Rothko's earlier classical paintings. In No. 8 (Figure in Archaic Sea), even the sun – a symbol of Apollo – is half eclipsed: the perfection of the circular orb is interrupted, an eloquent and concise representation of the eternal struggle of opposing forces through which art is born. In the vibrant sketched lines of the figure and the square, constructed temple, Rothko is illustrating the dynamic struggle at the heart of his (and Nietzsche’s) artistic credo.

The word ‘archaic’ in the title is not accidental. Rothko used it in the titles of several works, such as Agitation of the Archaic (1944) and Archaic Fantasy (1945), and it appears frequently in his discussions of his own art. Its root is the Greek archein – to begin – and Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy, as the title suggests, is also about a beginning. The Archaic Period (600 – 480 BC) witnessed the birth of Greek naturalistic art, itself the progenitor of the Western cultural tradition. However the contemporary usage of ‘archaic’ gives it an even more powerful allusiveness, having come to mean broadly the ancient and the primitive. It was a key word for Jung and Freud in their analysis of mythology and of the most instinctual and pre-verbal aspects of the human mind.

This insight into Rothko’s artistic credo makes this work profoundly exciting: it is a head-on confrontation with his beliefs about his craft; beliefs which continue to be expressed – not better, but differently – in the color field paintings. Rothko does not simplify in his later works, but subsumes what we see here into the floating quadrilateral shapes of post 1949. The figure, the gesture, the construction is absorbed and diffused into Rothko’s glowing squares and rectangles, imbuing them with their emotive and allusive intensity. This piece is a key that unlocks the fields of color. Or, to use the spiritual comparisons so often applied to Rothko, this is the gospel on which the theology is built. Looking at his totally abstract paintings, we are forced to admire their power and Rothko’s artistic stature. But seeing this work, we can understand it.