Christopher Rothko—the highly affable son of the famed not-so-affable Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970)—has written a volume of essays lovingly re-examining his father’s life and work. Entitled Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, it was published last November by Yale University Press, and its author has been promoting it with a passion inspired by devotion to the parent whose suicide left him bereft at the tender age of six.
Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1968.
As my readers are probably aware, I’m no fan of Rothko’s work (see, most recently, “Barking Up the Wrong Trees in Art Education”). So it’s not surprising that I welcomed the opportunity to go head to head with Christopher earlier this month on the subject of his father’s paintings.
The unlikely venue was the New York City Junto [more]. I say unlikely because that monthly discussion forum—founded three decades ago by investor Victor Niederhoffer (who has generously hosted it ever since)—has focused on matters related to free markets, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, and investing. Ayn Rand notwithstanding, art has rarely been more than a tangential topic of discussion.
This month’s surprising departure from that pattern was due to Gene Epstein, the Junto’s main moderator in recent years. Epstein’s day job is as the economics and books editor of Barron’s weekly business magazine. But he happens to be married to abstract painter Hisako Kobayashi—who initiated him into the ranks of Rothko admirers, as he explained in his introductory remarks.
There was a particular irony in a Junto session devoted to Mark Rothko’s work, however, for Ayn Rand made a compelling case against the idea that any abstract work could be an objectively meaningful form of art. So I gladly accepted Epstein’s kind invitation to present my contrarian view—as summarized in these brief remarks [click on > to hear audio]
and fleshed out in dialogue with Christopher Rothko.
Rothko’s overriding aim as an artist, his son explained, was to find a “universal language” for his work—in order to move the maximum number of people, in a way comparable to music. As Christopher put it, Rothko was actually a painter who aspired to be a musician. With the proper training that is the vocation he would have chosen. Feeling a particular kinship with the music of Mozart (his favorite composer), he sought to create a visual analogue that would convey an emotional sense of the “human condition”—the “darker side” of life along with its joyful aspect—much as Mozart’s music does.
In that connection, color was for Rothko “almost synonymous with emotion,” Christopher noted. By applying layers of color, the painter hoped to suggest different emotions. Yet he seems to have discovered for himself that the analogy between abstract art and music soon breaks down, as I argued in my remarks. Consequently, he moved away from his early use of bright colors, because—Christopher explained—people read them as more “joyous” than he had intended (in contrast, would one ever hear intentionally sad music as joyous?).
Over time, therefore, Rothko’s palette became darker and darker and his canvases increasingly “minimalist,” Christopher noted, until they reached the nearly black monochrome aspect of his murals for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. That work came up in relation to the claim, quoted by Epstein from Christopher’s book, that Rothko was a great painter in part because “he pushed painting to do things it wasn’t necessarily designed to do.” Asked by Epstein what he thought painting was not necessarily designed to do, Christopher responded that it centers on the way we need to bring ourselves to the paintings—the need to slow down, spend time, and “lose yourself in them.” Of the Rothko Chapel, he observed, it’s a space “you can walk into and say ‘there’s nothing here’ and be absolutely right”—if, he added, you don’t spend the time to complete the “interactive process” the painter aimed for.
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Jewish Bride, c. 1667.
Early in the discussion, Christopher had noted that his father believed “the most powerful expression of an idea is abstract.” Yet he loved figurative paintings such as Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride. Moreover, as I later discovered. Rothko much admired the work of another representational painter, Piero della Francesca (to whom, Christopher noted, my blog happens to be dedicated!)—once arguing that he might have been the greatest artist who ever lived.
That is not the only contradiction begging to be reconciled regarding Rothko’s abstract work. In response to my remarks, Christopher surprisingly avowed that he actually agrees with most of what I said. In particular, he urges in his book that his father’s biography be left out of consideration in response to the work. Further, despite his prior emphasis on color, he now acknowledged that it is “secondary” to form, and cited an essay in his book entitled “The Quiet Dominance of Form.” On that point, he reported that his father was almost obsessive in adjusting the dimensions and proportions of the rectangular forms in his paintings. That limited repertoire of minimalist shapes is scarcely what I think of as meaningful “form” in painting, however—a term that instead conjures up for me the wealth of human figures, objects, and settings depicted by representational artists such as Rembrandt or Piero.
Although Christopher, like his father, loves the representational work of those and other masters, he said he struggles to find meaning in such work, insisting that to be art it must be about something more than the mere image. That is another point on which we happen to agree. Though I hadn’t touched on it in my brief remarks, I’ve stressed it throughout my work, including Who Says That’s Art?. Imagery in art is not an end in itself. It serves to embody values and a view of life.
One of the most telling moments of the evening occurred during the Q&A. Recounting a visit to the Rothko Chapel. a young woman seemed to echo what Christopher had said. “At first,” she confided,
I was perplexed by it, . . . and it felt like there was nothing there speaking to me. But I sat for a while, quietly, . . . and then I felt something. And the longer I sat there, the more I felt—the more energy and depth I felt from the paintings, which at first had felt very flat. And suddenly I realized that this whole space was humming, and it was quite powerful.
My question is, how much of that feeling was evoked by sitting in enforced silence in an enclosed, relatively bare space designated as a “chapel” (whose design had been largely overseen by Rothko)—rather than by the alleged power of the paintings themselves? In other words, how much of the “interactive process” Rothko aimed for in truth boils down to a viewer’s projection of self-generated feelings onto the nearly blank slate provided by the paintings?1
Readers can easily guess what my answer would be.
Notes
- In my remarks, I suggested that knowledge of Rothko’s troubled life, ending in suicide, may contribute to the emotional response some viewers have to his work. Contrary to that suggestion, Kobayashi (see above) reported that her first contact with Rothko’s work was at the 1978 Guggenheim Museum retrospective, when she knew very little about his biography. What moved her, she said, was the sense that he could “touch feeling without forms” and that he understood the “condition that we all live” in—the “pain” as well as the “happiness.” Such an account—from a fellow abstract painter who shares the same premises—does not prompt me to alter my general view, however, that emotional responses to Rothko’s work are mainly self-generated, rather than evoked by visual attributes of the paintings themselves. ↩
K: “To begin with, Jonathan, I’ve never denied that color can affect us emotionally. What I reject is the idea that it can be as deeply meaningful as music.”
Based on what? On what grounds do you reject others’ reports of the depth of meaning that they experience in art? Your position appears to be nothing but the fallacy known as the “argument from personal incredulity.” In other words, since you (and others whom you’ve selectively chosen to cite as sharing your lack of depth of response to certain art forms) don’t experience abstract visual art as being as deeply meaningful as you claim to experience music as being, then you simply can’t or won’t believe that no one else does either. Not exactly a rational argument. In fact, it’s really nothing but a personal, subjective refusal to believe that anyone could possibly have greater aesthetic knowledge, experience and sensitivity than you do in regard to any art form.
In essence, all that you’re doing as arbitrarily appointing yourself as the universal standard and limit of human cognitive function and depth of aesthetic experience. Anyone could play that game, right back atcha: “I reject the idea that music can affect you as deeply and meaningfully as the other art forms affect me! Specifically, opera, in general, does little or nothing for me, therefore it does little or nothing for everyone, and is not art. People who claim that it is deep and meaningful are lying or delusional or trying to impress the art world elite.”
What is completely lacking from your argument is objective proof that an abstract art form like music is actually “deeply meaningful” by your criteria (despite its not presenting objectively identifiable aural likenesses or representations of things in reality, or despite not presenting objectively identifiable concepts via an “objective conceptual vocabulary”), and that abstract visual art is not “deeply meaningful” to people other than you. You’re pretending to have an “objective” means of measuring “meaningful depth.” You have no such means.
K: “Rothko’s attempt to create through his minimalist canvases a visual analogue of Mozart’s music failed because it was fundamentally misguided. Mozart’s ability to convey both the joy and the pain of life did not reside in a single chord—the musical counterpart of a single painting by Rothko. It lay in subtle modulations of tone and melody over time.”
I don’t accept your premise that a Rothko painting is the equivalent of a “single chord.” Where music, as you correctly note, uses “tone and melody over time,” abstract visual art uses space, form, proportion, contrast, similarity, saturation, hue, light and dark, juxtaposition, texture, visual flow and rhythm, etc. The fact that you, personally, may be unaware or unaffected by all of these combined compositional elements of abstract visual art doesn’t mean that those who are aware and affected by them are “misguided.” Despite your apparent wish to the contrary, your personal lack of response to given art forms is not an “objective” standard by which to determine what is and is not art for all of mankind.
K: “Of course, people respond differently to works of art, dependent on their personal background and predilections—as I’ve clearly argued in Who Says That’s Art? (see pp. 38-40, for example). But I doubt that anyone from any culture or background would hear a musical dirge as joyous.”
I would suspect that it is probably indeed very unusual (though not impossible) for people to misidentify extremes, such as a dirge as joyous, and that it is just as unusual for people to misidentify abstract visuals intended to be sorrowful as gleeful. But there are many other emotions between those extremes, and it is very common for one person to hear, say, an anxious tension in a piece of music that another hears as carefree exuberance.
K: “Finally, you seem to equate aesthetic response with aesthetic judgment. Rand made a good case for distinguishing between the two, which I agree with (see the above-noted pages).”
I own the book, but don’t have it in front of me at the moment. But I think I can guess where you’re going with this.
Is the idea that people’s “senses of life” are filters through which they experience art, and, therefore, if someone experiences something differently than you do, the explanation is that they have a different (and inferior?) “sense of life”? If you or Ayn Rand interpret a painting to mean X, and I say that, no, I take it to mean Y, then that is just further proof of our differences of “sense of life,” even though I completely reject your assertions about my psychology and “sense of life”?
If so, it sounds a lot like a theory which is designed to be unfalsifiable, which would put it into the realm of pseudoscience/pseudophilosphy.
Anyway, my reason for citing Rand’s notion of “objective esthetic judgment” was that it presents her proposed hermeneutic method — her notion of how to go about objectively interpreting an artwork’s meaning as well as the skill with which it was executed. In her view, one is to disregard one’s likes and dislikes, one’s feelings, emotions and “sense of life.” One is only to identify the “artist’s meaning” (exclusively by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing no other, outside considerations).
(Though, unfortunately, Rand gives no indication of how one is to “objectively” verify that one has identified what one takes to be the “artist’s meaning” versus that one has misidentified it — it seems that she believed that she could simply forcefully assert that she had correctly identified an artwork’s true meaning, and that anyone who disagreed, including the artist himself, was just plain wrong. Like you, it didn’t occur to her that the viewers’ abilities are just as much in question as the artists’, and that we would need to find a way to objectively measure the fitness of those judging the art, and their aesthetic sensitivities, knowledge, abilities and limitations. Simply announcing or strongly implying one’s infallibility and superiority isn’t enough. It’s not “objective.”)
Jonathan Smith
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
You’re free to disagree with me, Jonathan, but not to claim that my argument is based merely on my personal response. In any case, I’m not about to re-argue my position in this limited space, much less to revisit Rand’s entire theory of art—not to mention, in what respects I differ from her (on that point, see “Understanding and Appreciating Art“).
True, we often can’t be sure of an artist’s intentions, but in the case of Rothko he stated them. And the fact that many people misread them—as he himself lamented—surely indicates that there was something wanting in his approach.
You wrote,
“By applying layers of color, the painter hoped to suggest different emotions. Yet he seems to have discovered for himself that the analogy between abstract art and music soon breaks down, as I argued in my remarks. Consequently, he moved away from his early use of bright colors, because—Christopher explained—people read them as more ‘joyous’ than he had intended…”
How do you conclude that Rothko’s view of the similarity between abstract visual art and music breaks down? That conclusion does not follow.
Another possible explanation is that he simply had different emotional responses to colors than did the people who viewed his work. In fact, your citing the fact that other people “read” his colors as more joyous than he intended would logically suggest that people do indeed experience emotions in colors just as they do in music, and that Rothko, for whatever reason, merely felt a bit differently in his responses to colors than most others. Perhaps he had a different level of sensitivity than others — either more finely tuned or less finely tuned — or perhaps his having spent his formative years in a completely different culture than his audience might explain the difference. No need to jump to the hasty predetermined conclusion that you’ve jumped to.
If I remember correctly, even Ayn Rand recognized that music which strongly affects people of one culture will have a different effect on people of another. Do we therefore rush to the judgment that Americans’ experiencing Oriental music differently than its composer intended proves that music theory “breaks down”? Of course not! That would be a non sequitur.
It’s not at all uncommon for artists, including realist/representational ones, to show their work and then discover that the general public views it as being either much more gloomy, mawkish, or syrupy, etc., than intended. It shouldn’t be news that not all people experience or interpret a given work of art in the same way as everyone else!
Additionally, in light of all of the research that has been done which confirms the psychological/emotional/mood effects of color, it really is odd to hear someone attempting to deny the common emotional effects! You do realize, do you not, that even realist/representational artists have long recognized and employed the effects of colors for their emotional expressiveness/evocativeness???!!!
You continued,
“…(in contrast, would one ever hear intentionally sad music as joyous?).”
I’ve often encountered different people reporting different emotional experiences when listening to music. One person might experience a melody as joyous, where another also hears that joy, but also notices something that the other did not, such as an accompanying sadness in the timbre. Some people are more aware, observant, and sensitive to all aspects of a work of art. Others are a bit tone-deaf, nonchalant and artistically unaffected. The inability of some people to experience something in art is not proof of the inability of all people.
The same is true of all art forms. It’s very common for viewers, listeners and readers to experience artworks, including highly realistic/representational ones, quite differently than others do, and differently than the creators of the works intended. I would suggest that you should consider doing some actual scientific research into the issue of people’s ability, or lack thereof, to identify meaning and artistic intentions in works of art, rather than just guessing, introspecting and intuiting. I’ve dabbled a bit with such experimenting, and have tested many Objectivists for their ability to comply with the Objectivist method of “objective esthetic judgment.” They haven’t fared well at all, especially when tested with realist/representational works. Aesthetic response doesn’t work the way that your theory demands. Practically nothing qualifies as art when your criteria are applied and tested in reality.
But, please, don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself!
Jonathan Smith
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
To begin with, Jonathan, I’ve never denied that color can affect us emotionally. What I reject is the idea that it can be as deeply meaningful as music. Rothko’s attempt to create through his minimalist canvases a visual analogue of Mozart’s music failed because it was fundamentally misguided. Mozart’s ability to convey both the joy and the pain of life did not reside in a single chord—the musical counterpart of a single painting by Rothko. It lay in subtle modulations of tone and melody over time.
Of course, people respond differently to works of art, dependent on their personal background and predilections—as I’ve clearly argued in Who Says That’s Art? (see pp. 38-40, for example). But I doubt that anyone from any culture or background would hear a musical dirge as joyous.
Finally, you seem to equate aesthetic response with aesthetic judgment. Rand made a good case for distinguishing between the two, which I agree with (see the above-noted pages).
I liked your question about sitting in silence before a painting. It reminds me of the Rorschach ink blot test. I also question the association of abstract expressionists being used by the CIA for propaganda. I do appreciate a son trying to understand his father and his work.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Your three points are well taken, Roy. The CIA connection was an especially “absurd inversion of values,” as I argue in my book.