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ROTHKO: COLOR AFTER THE OBJECT
When color stops describing and starts thinking.
The third of the trilogy in a sequence on perception.
The first piece staged the question; the second let the world answer it through Kiarostami’s outward gaze. This one watches the answer return.
Untitled, Mark Rothko, 1970
Rothko did not paint ideas of objects. But this was not always true. In the early 1930s he painted figures, subway riders mostly, solitary people in underground light, not quite meeting each other’s eyes. The loneliness in those works is legible, almost literal. A man stands apart. A woman waits. The color does what color has always done: it belongs to the thing it covers.
He spent the next two decades taking that away. Across a long sequence of decisions, each one small, each one a subtraction, he made color stop doing the job it had done since the cave at Lascaux. Red stopped belonging to the cloak. Blue stopped belonging to the sky. By the early 1950s he had arrived at the rectangles, soft-edged, hovering, suspended in fields of tone, and there he remained for years, working the same formal territory with the patience of someone who had found the question and intended to exhaust it. What was left was not abstraction, a word that has always misdescribed him, but a sustained inquiry. What happens when color is required only to affect a mind, and no longer to describe a world?
Bergson had already answered, in 1896, though he could not have known he was answering for a painter not yet born. Perception is a meeting. The body brings what it carries, memory, feeling, the long sediment of having lived. The world brings whatever is present. Something occurs between them. Rothko staked his working life on this.
The painting is not the object of the experience. It is one half of the encounter. The other half walks in wearing its own weather.
Untitled (Red, Blue, Orange),
Mark Rothko,
Phillips Auctions
Which is why he fought the museums. He wanted the paintings hung low, close to the viewer, in light dim enough that the body could register what the eye was being offered. He refused rooms where his work would become decoration. In 1959 he resigned the Seagram commission, the paintings were to hang above diners in the Four Seasons restaurant, and returned the money. The quarrel was not precious. It was structural. A Rothko seen from across a bright room is a rectangle of color. A Rothko approached in silence, at the right distance, with one’s breathing slowed, is something else.
The work completes itself in the viewer, or it does not complete.
The reds, the blacks, the ochres are not descriptions of feeling. They are the conditions under which feeling arises. A field of oxidized red over a narrower band of black does not depict grief. It produces, in a body that stands before it long enough, a lowering.
Then the palette changed. In 1968 Rothko suffered a severe aortic aneurysm. He survived, but his doctors restricted him to smaller canvases and lighter work. He responded by moving toward gray. Then toward black. The warm reds and luminous oranges that had defined two decades of painting contracted into something narrower, closer to the ground. The blacks and grays of the final series have none of the hovering warmth of the earlier fields. They do not invite the body to settle. They ask it to hold still. The same formal logic applies: color as event, not description. But the event has changed. What arises in front of the late paintings is not a lowering. It is a stillness that does not resolve. A field from which something has been removed, and the removal left visible.
This is where the trilogy’s argument turns on itself.
Rothko Chapel, Mark Rothko, 1964-1967
Take the apple away. Take the sky, the ribbon, the cloak. What remains, and this is the question the late paintings ask, is the field itself, freed from the duty of pointing anywhere. Something is still happening on the canvas; what is happening has changed addresses. It used to occur out there. Now it occurs in whoever is looking.
Three pieces have made an argument about perception. The first asked the question. Kiarostami staged the answer outward, through the world. Rothko stands here, in front of a canvas in dim light, and watches the answer return inward, with the world removed. Between them: the idea that perception is not a channel but a meeting. Kiarostami worked one side of the meeting. Rothko worked the other.
Which is a room. Low light. A painting the size of a door, gray on black, or black on black, the edge between them barely there. And the slow, almost unnoticeable work of standing in front of it until something one had not expected begins to occur. Not what the earlier paintings offered.
Something quieter. Something that asks, without asking, how much a color can hold before it stops being color at all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory 1896. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911
Rothko, Mark. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. Ed. Christopher Rothko
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004
Ashton, Dore. About Rothko.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1983
Kiarostami, Abbas. The Colors (Rang-ha), 1976
The Rothko Chapel, Houston
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Rothko Room