MARK ROTHKO AND ME

Over New Years’, my husband and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary with a trip to London and Paris. The trip was originally scheduled for just London, but after reading a review of the Mark Rothko Retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, we added Paris to our itinerary. Some might suggest it’s a long way to go for art.

The show itself was staged in the foundation’s Frank Gehry building in the 16th arrondissement, near the Bois de Boulogne, a subway ride and a fifteen-minute walk in biting cold from our hotel. The guards wouldn’t let us into the building to wait, so we shivered in line with other early arrivers, trying to keep the circulation going in our toes.  

However, once inside, it was clear the show had been carefully planned. The galleries were full of spectators, but not overcrowded. People moved at a reasonable pace. Museum benches were available for longer viewing, and no cell phones or loud conversations disturbed the patrons.

In this calm atmosphere, it was easy to focus on how the confinement of human forms by pillars or buildings early in Rothko’s career morphed into his famous color blocks later. These later paintings centered the show and are what most people recognize. Frequently, they are described as peaceful. My reactions to them are complicated, and often I am unsure how I feel in their presence. The edges are fuzzy and bleed off the canvas. The color is elusive, made of many layers. The colors chosen within each canvas don’t always sit easily next to each other, or appear murky under a heavy haze of grey or black.

On one wall of the exhibit, the curators had posted the following quote: “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.”

I’ve been puzzling over what to make of Rothko’s “utter violence,” although, in many ways, the statement makes sense of my conflicting feelings. Maybe he meant to contain the violence like an unopened Pandora’s box, so that some feel the peace of its absence. Maybe his paintings put us in touch with the human history of pain, something being reenacted yet again in the blocky graves of Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine, a thing so overwhelming that we feel our own pain drawn out of us and into the container of the painting. Perhaps part of standing in front of a monumental artwork such as a Rothko painting demands we look into the void (in the same way we do in meditation) just a little, to show ourselves we can stand it or to slowly inure ourselves to its terror.  

I’m also reminded of Georgia O’Keeffe saying her paintings were of flowers, not female sexual anatomy. Or a grad school comrade who was deeply offended that all his workshop partners believed his story’s character to be gay. I write these columns and people respond in unpredictable ways, based on what they see, which sometimes matches my intention. I give a lot of credence to artistic intent, but intent only takes us so far. Sometimes something else in us speaks for us.

Maybe we don’t always know what we’re speaking to or of in our own work. I would like to think Rothko was addressing the soul—a need for there to be something beyond the grave, because otherwise human life is only unending silence and loss. But finally, maybe all he could see was the violence he’d contained.

I’m struggling with those violences in myself as I puzzle over this last phase of life I’m entering: despair at the wrinkles and grey, melancholy at the alternative lives I might have lived, frustration at my limitations, grief at the losses. When I look at Rothko, there’s room to feel that without being overwhelmed. Those paintings reflect my self back to me—without defining whatever that “self” is, a self that may change from viewing to viewing. I can step into the paintings and my violences are contained—just for a moment—and from that comes, maybe, the kind of peace people see there.

Thanks for reading. I always love comments.