Mark Rothko ed. Jeffrey Weiss Yale 376pp, £40 in UK
This volume is basically the catalogue of the major Rothko exhibition which opens this year in Washington, moves to New York and then crosses the sea to Paris. Weiss's well-illustrated catalogue section is backed up by contributions from John Gage, Carol MancusiUngaro, Barbara Novak, Brian O'Doherty (who, of course, is Irish), Mark Rosenthal and Jessica Stewart. That adds up to a formidable scholarly team, though the text is not allowed to crowd out the colour plates. These are good of their kind, though Rothko, of all late 20th-century masters, is probably the least amenable to reproduction. The physical amplitude of his paintings is part of their power and poetry, even part of their being - the way they "breathe". Rothko's suicide in 1970, in his late sixties, came not only as an emotional shock to his admirers but a moral shock, too. Surely, they felt, the creator of these symphonic, emotionally profound, softly pulsating canvases was a man who could rise above the normal trials of life and eventually drop anchor in some haven of the spirit. Rothko was enormously respected by most of those around him, and by many younger artists who saw in him spiritual and intellectual resources which they themselves could only grope after vaguely. Suicide belonged by right, or by convention, among bohemian artists who drank, drugged, hurtled about in fast cars (like Pollock) or indulged in serial divorce. Rothko was in poor health at the time of his death; he was a hard drinker and a heavy smoker, and at various periods in his life had suffered from depression. (It goes almost without saying that, like most Americans, he consulted his psychiatrist(s) regularly.) He was long divorced from his first wife, and separated from the second; to console himself he embarked on an affair with the widow of the painter Ad Reinhardt. Rothko was also estranged from several of his leading contemporaries, including Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still - though Still appears to have been a touchy megalomaniac who fought with almost everybody around or near him. So those who looked to find in Rothko's private life the spirituality of the paintings met only a grey area; he was not a serene or happy man, as the famous "black" paintings of the Sixties could perhaps have told them. Perhaps, too, he was aware of being an isolated figure in the midst of his world fame. Rothko rejected any common identity with the Abstract Expressionists or "Action Painters" and usually refused to take part in group exhibitions, including some highly prestigious ones. In fact, he was unyielding on certain points and made difficulties for numerous people on numerous occasions, behaviour which can variously be interpreted as "integrity" or as simple cussedness. Success came to him relatively late, so he may have found it hard to handle, but the truth almost certainly lies deeper than that. Rothko knew that his art was unique, that he stood alone in his era, and that the new generation of artists - whether Pop, hard-edge abstract, minimalist, or whatever - was antithetical to what he stood for. He was a man enveloped by a profound psychic loneliness. He was born Marcus Rothko witz in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903, the son of a pharmacist. The family emigrated in relays to America, where Rothko's uncle was already established, and young Marcus, his mother and sister arrived in the US in 1913. His father died of cancer the following year and for a time Marcus sold newspapers in the street, but he went through high school and even won a scholarship to Yale. He left without a degree and after some abortive flings at an acting career, drifted into art, becoming friendly with the older painter Milton Avery and a member of a coterie which included his fellow-Jews, Adolf Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. His first wife, Edith Sachar, became a successful jewellery designer and their already strained marriage finally broke in 1943 after Rothko had served unwillingly for two years as her salesman - painter-husbands whose work didn't sell were a liability. Within a few years he married again, to Mary Alice (Mell) Beistle, while becoming increasingly in demand as an art teacher and lecturer. A turning point came when Peggy Guggenheim signed him up for her New York gallery, at a time when the new art (predominantly abstract) was beginning to attract wider attention, and the realist and neo-Romantic styles of the 1930s were finally in retreat. In 1951 Life magazine carried its now-familiar group picture of the "Irascibles", avant-gardists who refused to play ball with the American art establishment; besides Rothko himself, the photograph includes Gottlieb, Newman, Still, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin, among others. Within a few years, they were to be known worldwide as the "Action Painters".
World fame came quite quickly after that, and when Rothko with his wife visited Europe (including St Ives in Cornwall) in 1959, he was treated as a celebrity, and England, in particular, acclaimed his vision. John F. Kennedy invited them to his inauguration in 1961, a sure sign that the Irascibles were rapidly becoming the new Establishment. Many of them failed to learn how to live with success, after the long, nagging years of poverty and insecurity (especially during the 1930s Slump), and as a result alcoholism and divorce were common, or even premature death like Pollock's. So while Rothko created many of his greatest paintings in these years of fame - including those in the Rothko Room of the Tate Gallery - his personal life suffered through quarrels, misunderstandings and marital strain, as well as heart trouble. In retrospect, his suicide should not have been the surprise it was. The various essays in this book assess him from different angles, and there is also a chronology which is very useful in itself, but contains some odd and ungainly English. It is surprising to learn (from John Gage) that Rothko did not regard himself as a colourist and insisted that his pictures were based on "measure" - a point interestingly echoed by the painter Ellsworth Kelly in a brief interview at the end. He also insisted that his expansive scale was intended to create intimacy with the viewer, not to impress or overpower him (or her). More disturbing to read, though we had been hearing it for a long time, is that he sometimes used unstable or inferior paints and that as a result, many of the paintings have altered in colour - as a comparison of their present condition with old photographs of them reveals. Fleeing colours or not, Rothko remains a very great and original painter - perhaps the greatest of the past half-century. Whether you class him among the giants of 20th-century American art, or among the East European abstractionists who include Malevich and Kandinsky, or simply as a painter who is sui generis, his stature remains huge. Perhaps, after some decades of the Cool aesthetic, we are now ready once again to listen to his organ-voice and to absorb its message.
Brian Fallon is former Chief Critic of The Irish Times