New Work by Rothko: A Book of Writings

[7/4]

October 14, 2004

New Work by Rothko: A Book of Writings

By PHOEBE HOBAN

Christopher Rothko was only 6 when his famous father, the painter Mark Rothko, committed suicide in 1970. "I have a number of memories, but I can count them on my various fingers and toes, and strangely enough it's his voice that sticks with me," he said.

Now Mr. Rothko has found a way to channel his father's voice not only for himself but also for the public, in the process resurrecting a long-lost manuscript by Mark Rothko that helps illuminate the philosophical underpinnings of Color Field paintings, the artist's greatest breakthrough.

This month Yale University Press will publish those writings in a deceptively slender volume titled "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art," the only book by Mark Rothko. In it, he muses on the history of art and the artist's place and function in the world. He also begins to explore the use of color, light and space in search of "an ultimate unity."

"I'm doing a talk on the book called 'Mark Rothko's Crystal Ball,' because it's uncanny and almost unnerving the degree to which he presages the work to come," said Christopher Rothko, who refers to passages in the book as the "abstractionist's manifesto."

"For art is always the final generalization," the artist wrote. "It must provide the implications of infinity to any situation. And if our own environment is too diverse to allow a philosophical unity, it must find some symbol to express at least the desire for one."

His son explained over lunch in Manhattan last week, "He's seeking this confluence of religion and philosophy and poetry, which isn't necessarily only what his later paintings are about, but it's certainly a rich, meaningful understanding of them."

The sometimes stilted book provides insights into Rothko's thoughts on ancient and primitive art, the Renaissance and Surrealism, among other topics. It reflects the author's intense intellectual curiosity and ambition, as well as a polemical streak. Though Rothko never directly refers to his own art, or even acknowledges that he is a painter, the book reveals something of his life at the time. In its dismissive discussion of the decorative arts, for example, it hints at the stress of his marriage to his first wife, Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer who at one point put him to work for her.

The story of how the book came to light, which Christopher Rothko describes in his introduction, is a convoluted one. Just six months after the artist ended his life at age 66, his wife, Mell, 48, died of a heart attack. Their children, Christopher and his sister, Kate, then 19, were almost immediately plunged into more than a decade of Dickensian legal battles involving the executors of the Rothko estate and the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan, which were ultimately fined millions for their roles in the scandal.

(Christopher was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle in Columbus, Ohio, until age 12, when he moved in with his sister, a pathologist, and her husband in Baltimore.)

Although Christopher and Kate Rothko had heard that their father's personal effects included an unfinished manuscript, it was not until 1988 that the pages surfaced, discovered by the estate's registrar in a warehouse, in an accordion folder marked simply "Miscellaneous Papers."

"It was sloppily typed, with numerous hand-marked additions and deletions - and more numerous typos - and it betrayed no obvious order or narrative direction," Christopher Rothko writes in the introduction. "If there was something of interest - and at first glance there really wasn't - to make something of it truly would have been a nuisance."

Then there were the manuscript's negative associations with the litigation. "Because of my experience with large reams of paper involving my father, it was the last thing I wanted to look at," Mr. Rothko said. "The legacy of the horrible legal thing interfered with my really taking it seriously."

Once the legal battles were over, there were years of wrangling with the Internal Revenue Service over the value of the paintings, which had greatly appreciated since the artist's death, before the heirs finally gained access to their father's artwork in the early 80's.

"It wasn't until I was in college, in 1986, that I ever hung a work of my father's in my apartment," Mr. Rothko said. He has a childhood memory of "the paintings all around me, and there were specific paintings that were very near and dear to my heart."

" 'Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea' seems like the most notable," Mr. Rothko said, referring to a 1944 painting. "It hung over our couch. It was always there. It was painted for my mother."

Today at least half a dozen of his father's works hang in the Upper West Side home he shares with his wife, Lori Cohen, and two sons and a daughter.

About 10 years ago, Christopher, now 41, became involved with his father's art, eventually giving up a practice as a psychotherapist to devote himself to it full time. "I've been very instrumental in putting together a lot of exhibitions," he said, "and I'm hands-on with the paintings pretty much every day, so I've gotten to know them very well. And through the paintings, I've gotten to know my father - there's a type of understanding and knowledge that comes from that.".

His training as a therapist (he has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan) has also helped him come to terms with his father's suicide. "I was never told a candy-coated story of how he died - I was told directly, and at that age, it doesn't mean what it means to you later," he said. "He died, and that's it. What I usually feel is sadness for him. I feel how utterly despairing he must have been to just throw everything away."

It took Christopher Rothko the better part of a year to edit the battered 226-page manuscript, believed to have been written in 1940 and 1941, when Rothko suffered a depression and put down his brushes for a year, delving into books on philosophy and myth. (One page is dated 1941, although Rothko referred to the manuscript in letters to the painter Milton Avery as early as 1936.)

One particularly difficult problem was the sequence of chapters, which, although suggested by some of his father's notations, was not always clear. Another problem was that the artist wrote numerous drafts of each chapter and did not complete some of them.

Still, the son was unprepared for how intimate the process became. "I found myself having this strangely personal, sort of collegial relationship with my father that I hadn't anticipated," Mr. Rothko said. "It's like having a conversation with him."

He added, "I think that underneath, I must have known that here was a way to have a relationship with my father that was unique."

He also discovered he was much more his father's son than he had realized. "Here I was getting inside his head and seeing glimpses of a man I thought I knew and also seeing these strange glimpses of myself," he said. "I find myself sharing opinions about art with him - we both are pretty critical of Michelangelo. Who else doesn't like Michelangelo?"

Jeffrey Weiss, head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art and curator of a 1998 Rothko retrospective, said: "It's a ponderous text, but it's a big deal because it belongs to his formative period and shows the working process of the artist's mind as he grapples with big ideas about the history of color and space in art, which are key themes for his later work."

For Christopher Rothko, the work also functions as a metaphorical family album. "I think the most concrete thing about my father in my life is his absence," he said. "You know, I've got a few Polaroids that are fading and that's kind of it.

"There are these paintings that speak so much - and yet so abstractly," Mr. Rothko said. "This is still a philosophical text, this ain't no kiss and tell, but I hear his voice, I see the manuscript page, and his handwriting, and the cross-outs and the rethinking and the sketching in. It was a fascinating process. In rediscovering the book, I rediscovered my father."

Indeed, for the first time since he was a young child, Christopher suddenly found himself calling his father dad.

"I'd be trying to sort through something," he said, "and he'd just have written the most convoluted sentence known to mankind, and it's like, 'Oh Dad, come on.' Believe me, it shocked me - I'd never had a second-person utterance in his direction since I was 6 years old, but here I was addressing a ghost. But it wasn't a ghost, because he was in my hands in some strange way."

And what would his father think of the finished book? "I think he would have felt like 'Yes, this is basically me, let me tell you all the ways in which I'm different now,' " Mr. Rothko said. "I think he'd recognize himself, but he'd want to do about 10 more drafts."