When mark rothko committed suicide in 1970, he left behind hundreds of unsold paintings. Partly, he didn’t want to flood the market, but he also found it hard to part with them. He considered his artworks to be his children, and he didn’t like to send them off to live with just anybody. In the early ’60s, when Jean Kennedy Smith, a sister of President Kennedy, asked to take one or two paintings home “on approval,” he refused: “It is not a matter of my pictures fitting in with something else,” he said with a huff. One collector who did pass muster was David Rockefeller. In 1960, he bought, for less than $10,000, White Center, a painting of shimmery white and yellow bands on a luscious pink field. It hung in his office until 2007, when he sold it at Sotheby’s for $72.8 million—still the auction record for a contemporary American painting. We can only guess how Rothko would feel about that distinction in today’s bloated art market, but it would probably drive him up the wall.
Rothko was the last in a line of angst-ridden, soul-searching artists who had a love-hate relationship with success. For him, selling art was secondary to making it—in sharp contrast to the 21st-century art world, where dealers scramble to sign up the next hot young painter fresh out of grad school and where money is the only marker of success. Rothko couldn’t have handled that kind of career; even as a mature artist, he wrestled anew with every raw canvas. In the late 1950s, he began agonizing over his biggest commission to date: a series of murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. His struggle to make those paintings forms the backdrop for Red, a 90-minute whirlwind of a play by John Logan that opens on Broadway this week. As played by Alfred Molina, the volcanic artist comes off as darkly comic, cranky, arrogant, angry, self-doubting, brilliant, and monstrous, his rainbow of emotions splattering across the stage. With Mozart on his studio hi-fi, Rothko duels with his psyche over what the commission means. The project fulfills his desire to create an entire environment that will surround viewers with a suite of brooding paintings. Yet he fears the pictures could become mere décor at a fancy feeding trough for the ultra-rich. How could a Russian-born, left-wing artist—who, for the sake of his work, had spent most of his career in poverty—reconcile such a pact with the devil? At one point, he explodes (this is an actual Rothko quote): “I hope to ruin the appetite of every sonofabitch who eats there!”
Rothko waged many internal battles,
especially out of his fears over the approach of the next generation of artists. Pop art’s clever appropriation of cultural icons—Jasper Johns’s American flags, Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes—reflected the zeitgeist with deadpan irony. But Rothko’s wasn’t art of the moment: he believed what he was creating was timeless, meant to exist as a solemn communion between a painting and a viewer. It was hot, where pop was cool. “I am here to stop your heart,” he insists in Red.
After Rothko took his wife to dinner at the just-opened Four Seasons, he couldn’t stomach the thought of his paintings hanging in that glamorous setting and canceled the commission. Later in the ’60s, he finally did get the chance to create two suites of murals: one set for Harvard and 14 paintings for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. He gave eight of the panels he’d done for the Four Seasons to the Tate Gallery in England. The paintings arrived in London on the same bleak February day in 1970 that he cut open his arms in his New York studio and died at the age of 66.
In the years after Rothko’s death, pop’s once radical agenda began to reflect contemporary values in more ominous ways. Warhol’s artistry gave way to the enterprise of being Warhol, which blurred the lines between art, celebrity, branding, and commerce. Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami are among Warhol’s direct descendants: for them, creating the shock of the new isn’t getting easier—just think of Hirst’s pointlessly outrageous diamond-studded skull.
It may be a bit romantic to think of Rothko as the heroic lion raging against a changing world: on a good day, he liked money and fame, too. But whether or not you love Rothko’s paintings, it’s impossible to doubt the sincerity of his struggle to make them, to express the world as he saw it. Those luminous pictures have an authenticity, a lack of cynicism, that seems to belong to a distant time. How often do you encounter a new work of art that stops your heart, instead of your checkbook?
ARASPOT
Rothko wasa soul-searching artist with a love-hate relationship with success.
