Panero on the Rothko Retrospective

By James Panero | Wednesday, October 28, 1998

Before I hit on Rothko forgive me if I'm excited about the Jackson Pollock megashow opening this Sunday at MoMA. Pollock put the action in action painting, urinated into Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, kicked the crap out of the European surrealists, and turned the art world into a State school fraternity party starting 1950. One drunk night in 1956 he drove his pickup truck into a tree on Long Island and killed himself at age 44, earning a place in art-world mythology and a de facto Dartmouth degree.

Pollock lived as he painted. His enormous compositions are bold, expansive, violent, the products of this great alcoholic son of Montana whipping paint over his canvases. He was the archetypal defiant American,throwing mud in the face of European artistic tradition.

Even though the artists matured in similar ways the introvert Mark Rothko never lent himself to such easy understanding. Pollock began his art career producing Hopper-esque cartoonish pictures of Americana, oils fields and boom towns under the tutelage of folk-inspired Thomas Hart Benton. After a brief period of pictorgraphical bed-quilt compositions he sprung from the head of Zeus, around 1950, unrolling yards of canvas on his floor and unloading his cans of paint. Little of his early work hints at the masterpieces to come.

Rothko struggled perhaps more than Pollock under the weight of European masters. While Rothko painted scenes of New York city life early in his career, including claustrophobic images of the N.Y. subway system (Subterranean Fantasy , 1936), by the forties he had moved to Mir€-inspired surrealism, images of stick figures and amoebas floating in a Freudian sea. It all ranged from the mediocre to the bad and, had he died then, Rothko would have been a middle-aged man, 46 years old, an easily forgettable artist.

Where was Rothko's breakthrough? Hard to tell, even with so many paintings under one roof. In one room, painfully ugly surrealism, in the next, the Rothko style fully-formed. You can see the horizontal division of his canvases during the surrealist phase, but nothing hints at the blurry bursts of color to come, the blinding combinations that remind you of staring at the center of the sun.

With the opening of the Pollock show, New York will be host to an Abstract Expressionist showdown of sorts this fall, Rothko at the Whitney, Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art. How will they match up?

While Pollock is more impressive in person, Rothko reveals his flaws. One problem all curators encounter when mounting a Rothko show is the crayola-factory-explosion or we-all-live-in-a-yellow-submarine factor. Those colors that Rothko so well composed in each painting run together like a bad acid flashback with so many canvases in one room.

While one-on-one his paintings can resonate like a string ensemble, assembled together they are cacophonous. And while I heard the New York show is better arranged than its Washington predecessor (where the Rothko tour began) I still say, remember your blinders at the Whitney.

The second problem is more fundamental. Rothko sought nothing less than divine transcendence through abstract painting. His compositions were meant as spiritual records of hope, struggle, and eventual failure. What began as blasts of light and color in the 1950s become murkier and darker over the next twenty years, from red and orange to blue and green to black and gray. Near the end of his life Rothko painted a series of panels for what would become known as the Rothko chapel. The huge square canvases were painted black on black, a record of depression and a portent of onrushing death.

Rothko committed suicide a few years later in 1970. Abstract painting, in the end, could not save the painter's soul. Had his spiritually-charged art failed? The critic Hilton Kramer said Rothko's real religion was not salvation, redemption, or transcendence—but aestheticism.

His canvases may not lead to the sublime transcendence but they are, imminently, objects of beauty.

Panero on the Rothko Retrospective

Article Tools

Related Articles