Untitled

1963
Mark Rothko

Oil on canvas, 69 × 90 in. (152.4 × 228.6 cm). Seattle Art Museum, Gift of the Friday Foundation in honor of Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis, 2020.14.16. Photo by Spike Mafford / Zocalo Studios. Courtesy of Friday Foundation. © 2021 The Mark Rothko Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Our first impression of the Lang Collection’s 1963 painting by Mark Rothko is apt to be one of value and scale. A white bar emblazoned in the work’s upper reaches intensifies its dark palette. Below, three elongated, narrowly separated forms spread across a horizontal field that they redouble and almost fill—the composition is at once expansive and constrained. Yet, moving close to the painting, we see an unexpected detail: flecks of white so small and scattered they can only be detected from within several feet of the canvas. Paint flecks of this kind occur throughout Rothko’s work of the 1950s and early 1960s; they are generally accidental, the residue of process (rather than having been produced by deliberate, well-aimed flicks of the brush). Rothko used thinned paint, drops of which can fly off the bristles when, on being dipped, the brush is waved in front of the painting before landing to make a mark. The dimensions of the canvases were such that he worked as much from the shoulder as from the elbow and wrist. Elsewhere in Rothko’s works on canvas we also often detect running rivulets or drips.

The process of the work is thus exposed.¹ It is important to acknowledge that the artist’s painterly finesse does not represent a polished refinement—the kind of fastidiousness that might be attributed to the work were we to know it only through reproductions in books. Rothko did not speak much of process in this way, but the signs of it are clear, and they ask to be accounted for. A sensation of breadth is partly attained through the layered application of thin veils of paint that lightly hold the feathered gestures of the brush. A certain loose immediacy obtains. As the paintings are sized but not primed, paint both saturates the canvas and sits on its surface. In the course of making the work, other things happen—the flecks, the drips—that, although unplanned, are accepted by the artist as wholly in keeping with the material character of the painting overall. 

As David Anfam, author of the catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s paintings, has fully discussed, the period of roughly 1958 to 1966 in Rothko’s work was dominated by mural commissions: the Seagram murals (1958–62), the Harvard murals (1962–64), and his works for the Rothko Chapel in Houston (1965–66). Anfam identifies paintings produced independently of these projects as having been closely related in palette and, in some cases, structure to the murals, which were the object of intensive campaigns of work. Accordingly, the Lang Collection painting falls within what Anfam refers to as the period of the Harvard murals and related works.² Paintings for the Harvard mural project were distinguished by a palette of dark reds and plummy browns as well as deep blues and reddish, greenish, and bluish grays, a narrow range of hue and value that matches that of the Lang Collection painting. That said, Rothko introduced that palette during the late fifties, around the time of his work on the Seagram commission (fig. 1).

Moreover, like a number of other works of 1963 and 1964, the Lang Collection painting closely anticipates the even darker cast of the Houston murals, with their repertoire of near-black colors that have long been said to defy the specificity of a conventional name. In sum, the last ten or twelve years of Rothko’s production, within which the Lang painting falls, demonstrate various kinds of darkness that came increasingly to prevail. 

Yet we should not forget that while Rothko’s nonmural paintings are autonomous works, they often also share features with other paintings, as if they loosely belong to sets, sequences, or groups. While not systematic, such resemblances allow us to observe the artist investigating variants of specific combinations of color and form. For example, we note that the distribution of dark colors with a single white form in the Lang Collection painting closely corresponds to various works of this period in which the white area changes position—top, middle, bottom—within a field that is otherwise dark. One such painting, the much larger, horizontal-format No. 9 (White and Black on Wine) of 1958 (Glenstone), may have been painted as a possible Seagram mural panel (before Rothko developed a new image for the commission). Another work, Untitled (Black, White, Grays on Maroon) (1963, fig. 52), is vertical in format but identical in size to the Lang painting. Here, the matching dimensions—as if the same canvas had been rotated a single turn—expose a pictorial thought process that is, at least in part, analytical. In other words, while we often speak of Rothko in affective, metaphysical, and symbolic terms, we are reminded in a case like this that his studio practice was grounded in material and formal considerations. 

What, then, of those other terms? The literature on Rothko’s work is filled with names from the history of culture called upon as sources and models to help us account for meaning: Plato, Aeschylus, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rembrandt van Rijn, William Shakespeare, Søren Kierkegaard, J. M. W. Turner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, and beyond—it is a long and distinguished list, including artists, writers, and composers (leaving aside anonymous sources and the Old and New Testaments). Indeed, such references were common among Rothko and his contemporaries of the New York School. During the late 1950s, Rothko claimed that his works engage grand themes—tragedy, ecstasy, and doom among them. His remark was intended to keep the paintings from being taken as strictly abstract exercises in color and form, implying instead that his works function in metaphorical and/or symbolic ways. In his account of the history of the interpretation of Rothko’s work, the art historian Glenn Phillips addresses the different forms of experience or states of mind that have been invoked by Rothko’s observers, according to whom the works have been variously characterized as “transcendental, tragic, mystical, violent or serene; as representative of the void; as opening onto the experience of the sublime; as exhilaratingly intellectual; or as profoundly spiritual—to mention just a few examples.” These things conflict, yet, as Phillips observes, each draws from the conviction that the work’s chief function is to intensify the process of seeing.⁶ It seems clear that Rothko meant to address large themes through subjective experience. In this regard, he said that the large size of his canvases instigates a direct, “intimate” physical relation of the painting to the observer.⁷ In turn, heightened seeing—or beholding—belongs to the realm of consciousness, and this is where form and process open other doors of apprehension. 

Jeffrey Weiss is an independent curator and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. He has held senior curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he organized the 1998 Mark Rothko retrospective exhibition, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Most recently, Weiss was coeditor and coauthor, with Francesca Esmay, of Object Lessons: Case Studies in Minimal Art (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / D.A.P., 2021).