Rothko He only made one self portrait painting over the clipped course of his career, seen above, and what seems to be of particular interest are the glasses and clothing he gave himself and the way in which they sort of block and obstruct him - almost as though he built a building around himself. The edifice of cloth and glass obscure the man, burden him a bit, and provide a needed bit of distance for him to stay safe behind.
Really, though, his big panels of "color" are what we all know and think of when hearing his name. For most, they conjur up some heavy feelings - some people were known to throw themselves on the squeaky floor of the museum, lie prostrate, and weep before the canvases. He was dealing in expressions, after all, and not so much in pigment. Most viewers have a hard time viewing the paintings, often cocking their heads askance, shifting in their step from left to right, approaching the thing a bit closer or perhaps move backwards to the comfortable bench along the opposite wall - the fixed painting, the mobile watcher. I think sometimes that people are not even sure what they are actually looking at, whether or not it is a wall or door or portal of some kind (and they are!) but mostly people get "lost" in them and do not know where to start and form the basis of their interpretations. Maybe this is the expression he wished to convey? A noble raison d'art, to force people into a feeling of being lost.
Confusion and contrasting ideas - those are always the best way to attempt to touch his creations. One cannot even begin to dissect them without noting so many oppositions contained within, the paintings are at once light/dark, heavy/light, flat/deep, monochromatic/polychromatic, and many more conflicting adjectives could be engaged in order to pin down some basic description.
"An intimate expansiveness..."
"A blurred focus... or a focussed blur..."
He has this to say for himself:
"We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless."
What, though, can be said of his specific subject? They are boxes of varied color. They are paragraphs told in whisper on a dark page. They are feelings made of paint (and even this, this very simple reduction misses the entire point!) Not such a subject as say a still life with water jug, or a robustly bossumed peasant girl sitting amid a little slit of sun, or even some of those more surreal landscapes with dripping mountains and wiggly buildings - but a subject, still. Rather than painting a symbol for something that conveys what we might imagine to mean something similar to tragedy, he is attempting to simply paint "tragic" the feeling. Yes, that's about as basic a definition as it gets for "expressionism", and I am no scholar.
One thing the man who is watching the Rothko painting is doing is trying to establish its weight. He looks at it when entering the gallery and is immediately struck by the thing's permanence as well as the thing's simultaneous airiness (again, more contradictory notions) - while it appears to be wrought from the most weighty of concrete, with a skin of elephant hide, it also happens to look as though it were a fluff of clouds. Now, another type of "heaviness" is fantastically absent - that of a heavy-handed artist: Rothko's paintings are free from the bounds and restrictions of allegory; there are no Apples of Eden to be found, no deconstruction of this or that clunky symbol, no allusions to god or otherwise, none of this to burden the composition. The man watching the Rothko painting feels it both empty and crammed all at once - free of clutter yet surprisingly filled with the potential to become full. The issue of weight becomes more pressing for him and he begins to wonder if perhaps time might also be a factor, for it takes a single slice of a second to take in the entirety of the thing and the more time spent in the room with the painting the more these seconds begin to accumulate and, eventually, what seemed like light and fleeting moments of introspection begin to feel a bit more oppressive, like an appointment to dread or a gloomy visit with an analyst on the horizon. The man is left in this vacancy created by the painting, this empty space left only for himself, a scary room for him to inhabit that does not exist outside the walls of Rothko's creation. In a sense, this might be his subject - not a painting of the painter but a painting for the viewer. The physicalities of the painting itself lend to this assertion: there are at once visible techniques that are apparent (a thin sort of luminosity, a wispy cloudlike feeling in many of the lines that separate the blocks, and a strange indescribable method of applying the colors themselves so that none can be specifically called either "red" or "blue" or "yellow") and then also a complete lack of the painter's hand (we see no brush strokes, little of the underpainting, no perspective to create or ruin, and no scale to deal with.) His use of applying paint with a dry brush as well as a wet brush, creating feathered or hard edges, the piling of layers to create a sort of hazy wonderment about the color (it is blue, yes, but also red and yellow and black and white and all colors at once thus making it "no color") - the surfaces become a skin of sorts, some more dense while others are scratchy.
Think of a window.
Think of a false window.
Think of the intention behind the need for a window, now think of the intention behind the need for a false window.
An architect chooses the views from within a building by creating windows for the inhabitants. It is a conscious choice to open an aperture on a southern wall versus a northern one, and it is a conscious choice to have that opening look out onto either a stockade of trees, an expanse of sky, or the opposite wall of a neighboring house or building. Regardless, these views offer into the room a certain feeling, an expression. The room's inherent purpose is always that of shelter, which can be reduced moreso into the basic need for protection and while glass windows perhaps are not as safe as a solid concrete wall, they appeal to the occupant's need for a sight to see - a feeling to engage in, an experience to interact with, a thought to hold and bend into whatever shape he or she wishes.
Rothko, as an architect, gave us expressions of windows, rather than the windows themselves. He gave us "false windows" - everything about them seems so see through and normal, but we are responsible for inventing the view. A mere hint at a shape produces the shape, a mere hint at the thought produces the thought, but his art was that of hinting at un-shapes and un-thoughts so as to produce an overabundance of each. It's in his blur that we see a tight focus, and conversely in his focus that we begin to dissipate amongst ourselves. It has to do with time, it has to do with weight, it is light and heavy at the same time just as it is red now then blue then white and all colors and no colors at once. The larger the painting is, the more intimate it begins to feel and in this expansiveness we feel held close, tightly. His view is our view, his view is that of a gift to us of our own views, and the man searching his painting is really just searching for himself. In effect, Rothko's taken a mirror and coated it with a thick darkness and somehow below the blackened surface the thing reflects an image back in shadow. A viewless window, a physical invisibility.
See, it is only approachable oppositely.
