Thoughts on Mark Rothko at the Tate Britain

Mark Rothko, Untitled 1950

On my way home, I popped into the Tate Britain to see this Rothko piece.  

Conventionally, Rothko’s paintings are seen as canvases of “feelings”. They involve broad expanses of paint with strong and stirring juxtapositions of colour & hue. The minimalist abstraction does not seek to capture the tangible world, no flights of fancy or some unique angle or perspective of the world. Indeed, there is no external world, no scene or frame of reference. According to Rothko himself, he sought to communicate to our most core human elements, and not the tangible actors or landscapes on the canvas by which a drama can be exhibited. It’s the raw feelings that intense colour of life and its forms can evoke.

But are Rothko’s paintings void or are they truly imbued with the human spirit?

I think they are pretty and evocative in a visceral kind of way. They kind of draw you in, and the classic rectangular shapes have a melting shifting feel; with the rough dynamism of the colour. 

But, I must admit - after reading articles online - that I am baffled by the idea that anyone can be so emotionally overwhelmed that they have been brough to tears. I have certainly never seen anyone so affected at the Tate. Rothko’s canvases tend to have a meditative feel in the gallery with people lost in their thoughts or sitting quietly – but that’s it.

Having read some Steven Pinker, I think colour as a means of communication must be rooted in our genome. Like our response to music, it communicates to human beings at a deep level. In our evolutionary past, we needed some means of interpreting the world. Understanding colours helps us hunt, gather, make decisions, work together, and so on. The ability to distinguish between a rotten fruit and a red apple is tied to our emotional states (e.g. perhaps contentedness - green, distress - black, warning - red etc.). These by-product adaptations are forms of primal communication which bestowed environmental advantages. They could then be passed onto descendants. So, I suspect that when we stand before a Rothko; rather like music, it’s a super stimulation of those primal hereditary emotions which are fundamental to homo sapiens.

However, despite the adornment of its minimalism, I think any mystical - or even ‘spiritual’ - experience is a reflection of the viewer’s own imagination. I think we’re very good at trying too hard to be in tune with the artist’s surrounding work and persona, and it’s easy to inflate the power of the art. It’s too easy to project something from our own psyche which is not inherent in the work itself (i.e. intellectualising it).

For me, I feel I have to be careful not to import undue meaning in these painting. Most of the meta explanations and grand narratives accompanying Rothko’s paintings can be applied to almost any other piece of abstract art. By contrast, some abstract artists (like Pavel Filonov) have a near ‘spiritual’ weight of their own. When I see a Turner, a Vermeer, or a Van Gogh, I don’t need to do any meta heavy-lifting. Their works shine by themselves. No one needs to explain why we should love Van Gogh. It’s the kind of art where intermediaries are superfluous.

The supposed subjectivity of art is something I’m questioning. It feels too convenient, even a bit disrespectful and lazy, that in our era, a coop receipt is suddenly art. The question of what is art cannot rest merely on whether the onlooker can ‘connect’ with the artist (otherwise art becomes wholly arbitrary). It’s the difference between ‘enjoying the art’ and whether ‘the art is good’. In fact, I also don’t think beauty is subjective. I think we all recognise something stirring and alluring as a common language of humankind.

Returning to Rothko; something that confuses me is the question that, if his work is intended to be emotive, then the canvas must have some references which are necessarily objective. We are reacting to an object of the real world on that canvass; and it’s probably our genome that’s triggering our response.

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Update 26/07/2023

Some more detailed brushstrokes: