On Rothko

Mark Rothko was a difficult man to please, especially when it came to critical description and assessment of his work. As he said in a line that James Breslin adopts as a leitmotif in Mark Rothko: A Biography, “Silence is so accurate” (387). Rothko resented critics as “parasites feeding on the body of art” (385), and even when the critic was Elaine de Kooning, a fellow painter and a close friend, he insisted on staying up all night in her studio to supervise her line-by-line revision of her article “Two Americans in Action: Franz Kline and Mark Rothko,” and then wrote a letter to the editor repudiating it: “Real identity is incompatible with schools and categories, except by mutilation” (389). He was indignant about attempts to see art historically and biographically. In conversation with the young art historian Robert Seitz in 1952, he launched a frontal attack on the profession: “Historians’ unity is a unity of death. What we want is a live unity” (330). Even more damaging to art, from Rothko’s point of view, was psychological interpretation: “I don’t express myself in painting. I express my not-self” (274). As Dore Ashton famously noted, ¹ Rothko was an artist in love with the prefix “trans,” in quest, as he said in his article “The Romantics Were Prompted,” of “transcendental experiences” (239) beyond history, beyond society, beyond self.

When Rothko did condescend to speak or write about painting, he set austere, enigmatic terms that would be hard for a critic or art historian to imitate. In a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1958, Rothko offered a “recipe of a work of art,” including:

1. 1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death . . .

2. 2. Sensuality . . .

3. 3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.

4. 4. Irony. This is the modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.

5. 5. Wit and Play . . . for the human element.

6. 6. The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.

7. 7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable. [390]

Concluding a tiresome debate with the collector Ben Hess about the price of a painting, Rothko made the emblematic statement about artists and patrons: “Look, it’s my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it’s your misery that you have to love it, and the price of misery is $1,350” (418).

By its very nature, biography violates Rothko’s own conception of his work, and the biographer who approaches him as a subject must be hardy indeed. Mr. Breslin has demonstrated his hardiness, even to the extent of documenting the painter’s resistance to the historical method. A professor of American literature, he has painstakingly assembled the primary materials of the biographer’s trade: interviews, published and unpublished statements by the artist and his circle, catalogues, art critical apparatus, documentation of the paintings. He has also submitted himself to the discipline of looking long at, being absorbed by, Rothko’s paintings, and some of the most touching passages of his book record his experiences of allowing the paintings to lead him in, as if he were trying to write the kind of art criticism Rothko asked for from Robert Seitz: “The kind of writing we need today is for people to write their responses to painting” (330). He is quick, too, to take up the cudgels for his artist, presenting some of the more sinister characters in Rothko’s story as the Damned in a Last Judgment: particularly grotesque, as portrayed by Breslin, are the philistine collectors Robert and Ethel Scull; particularly villainous is Rothko’s accountant and advisor Bernard Reis whose wheelings and dealings seem to have contributed to the artist’s suicide. More unfairly, to my mind, Breslin lights into Clement Greenberg, who after years of brave and vigorous, however dogmatic, engagement in the arts, did not deserve to be pilloried as the dipsomaniacal lout of Breslin’s account. ²

Whatever its local failings—and the attack on...