Untitled

Rothko’s work on canvas and paper took this form throughout the early to mid-forties. These pictures often possess evocative titles featuring phrases such as archaic fantasy, primeval landscape, votive figure, hierarchical birds (fig. 1), and the like, as well as references to specific figures from history, myth, and religion including Lilith, Antigone, and Tiresias. By late 1946, his approach had begun to shift: titles were dropped and shapes became increasingly abstract, ultimately spreading across the surface in a long sequence of paintings of 1947–48 known as Multiforms.³ It would be wrong, however, to ascribe purely iconographical interest to the earlier works. To begin with, their symbolic ambitions remind us that the paintings of the fifties and sixties were themselves claimed by Rothko to encompass themes belonging to the history of myth and psyche in Western culture, although the artist’s means had, by then, dramatically changed. Moreover, Rothko’s pictures of the post-Surrealist period also show the origin of formal and technical devices that served his pursuit of a more radical, absolute kind of painting. 

So much of Rothko’s work of the early mid-forties, including the untitled Lang Collection painting, demonstrates a consistent division of the pictorial surface into two or three horizontal areas or zones before, within, or across which his motifs are lodged. In most instances, the paintings show a distinct figure-ground relation between the motifs and the divided space. Yet the “ground”—the horizontal bands—clearly anticipates the turn that Rothko’s work took in 1949: the emergence of two or three “stacked” rectangular forms. Those forms rarely extend from edge to edge the way the early bands do, but they often almost fill the surface, replacing the figure-ground relation of the earlier works with fields in which figure and ground almost merge. Even so, the resemblance between the bands of the forties and the stacked forms of Rothko’s work of the following two decades is noteworthy. Its early application is intermittent, but it represents one solution to a pictorial problem—the noncompositional animation of the plane—to which Rothko would return. 

While the division of the picture plane into two or three horizontal bands was a chief formal device in Rothko’s work of the forties, it possessed clear symbolic value. Quite apart from the iconography of life forms, totems, and glyphs, the division in and of itself implicates strata, in the geological and/or archeological sense. In this way, it figures formation in time. (The idea was shared among many disciplines. The psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud, for example, are filled with metaphors of stratification drawn from geology and archeology.⁴) We can, therefore, identify planar partition as a kind of symbolic form, an idea that has a direct bearing on Rothko’s work after 1949, by which time biomorphic imagery had been abandoned and content was solely borne by multiple liminalities of form, color, value, and pictorial space. In the artist’s later paintings, the metaphorical connotations of the early format are not eliminated but absorbed. At stake, in this regard, is the temporal significance of stratification: its allusion to that which lies below and comes before, and its intimations of gravity and space—of phenomena that are heavy, deep, hidden, or obscure. 

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).