Rothko, Melancholia, and the Spiritual Promise of the Baroque

During the summer of 1968, while vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and convalescing from a dissecting aortic aneurysm that left him in a deep depression that ended in his suicide in February of 1970, Mark Rothko took up painting in acrylic again; it was a medium he had begun to experiment with after making the Houston chapel murals, which impress their solemn monumentality on the viewer. As late works, made mostly throughout 1969, the “Brown on Gray” acrylic paintings on paper might appear to express the conditions of Rothko’s death: aware of the fragility of his health, both physically and psychologically, the artist lived out the remainder of his life in recognition of the fact that he could die at a moment’s notice. Rothko pursued the new project urgently and intensely. The paintings were made rapidly; his stroke was quick, and the quality of expression overwhelming. The sense of crisis Rothko felt at the end of his life is fully evident, but as they work upon the viewer the paintings also evoke wonder and have a confounding—although perhaps ultimately illuminating—effect.

Accounts of Rothko’s final years frequently suggest that his late works on paper, culminating with the “Black on Gray” series, make it evident that he was isolating himself in a depression so deep that suicide was inevitable.¹ When Robert Goldwater proposed this suicide thesis, he argued that the final paintings reverse the psychology of absorption typically characteristic of Rothko’s work. They distance the viewer so as to “reject participation and withdraw into themselves.”² Rothko’s hasty remarks in Provincetown, before an apparently indifferent audience in whom he saw no adequate sign of affirmation, only seemed to worsen his sense of estrangement. “But in his comments, fragmentary, brief, punctuated with long and heavy silences, and in his questions, freighted with a suppressed intensity,” Goldwater observed, “meanings were never mentioned.”³ And yet although they also qualify as works of crisis, the brown on gray works just preceding the black and gray series offer something other than this premonitory bleakness. The intimations of awe that they provide are equally emphatic. One gains the sense of Rothko struggling to reconcile himself with the detached image. Dore Ashton recounts that in a conversation with Robert Motherwell, Rothko described these paintings as constituting “a different world from myself ”—another reality, she claims, in which the artist “was not quite at ease.”⁴ Faced by the bewildering presence of these paintings, one can have no doubt that Rothko strove to achieve some form of resolution. In a similar way, the strange remoteness of these works compels the viewer to see more deeply, to grasp the elusive implications submerged within these shadowy images.

At this difficult time, Rothko was struggling to define and maintain his artistic vision, a fact that many knew because of his frequent complaints not only about the direction of his own painting but also about the sweeping changes that were taking place in the art world at the end of the 1960s. Rothko resented the effects of the burgeoning art market on his work, and he attempted both to resist its coercive force and to find a way of gaining from it materially. He feared the emergence of a rising younger generation of artists and, burdened by an intense awareness of his mortality, recognized the need to create a lasting statement for himself in his art, a statement that might expand upon the sense of foreboding achieved in the Houston chapel commission. Despite his critical success, Rothko felt that he was neither sufficiently valued nor completely understood. Whether he sensed that his life would end abruptly by suicide or as a consequence of his critical medical condition—a condition that doctors were convinced would be fatal in just a matter of years⁵—the paintings inevitably reflect something of his desperate situation. Given this pressure, Rothko’s decision to adopt acrylic offered him a means to experiment impulsively in a medium characterized by its insistence on immediacy of expression. In the ethereal world of shades that Rothko created, he was able...