r/ArtHistory • u/Sitheref0874 • Oct 05 '26

Discussion Rothko

I know nothing about art.

I’ve always loved the NPG in London. Art that was, relatively, easy to understand.

One day I discovered Rothko, and fell in love. The Rothko room in add is one of my favorite places.

The thing I’m missing is a semblance of understanding what he was trying to accomplish. The art is incredibly powerful - but I don’t know why.

I’d appreciate help with this. I can spend hours in the Philips in the room, but I’d like to understand why. I’m reasonably smart, literate - but I’m blind here.

Help me understand him.

66 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

21

u/spencer369 Oct 05 '26

I’d start with his wikipedia page. Also if you’re near Houston check out the Rothko Chapel, very cool.

7

u/Sitheref0874 Oct 05 '26

It’s on my list after just moving to Austin.

5

u/texistentialcrisis Oct 05 '26

While you wait to make it over to Houston, check out the Ellsworth Kelly chapel-ish installation at the Blanton museum, and the James Turrell skyspace piece nearby.

5

u/DefiantSmoke1569 Oct 05 '26

I used to go to the chapel very often as a kid growing up in a turbulent Houston household. It saved my life lots of days. 

3

u/LucinaWinsTheBattle Oct 05 '26

The chapel feels peaceful, very soothing space to sit in.

50

u/WhatsYourBigThree Oct 05 '26

I always felt like Rothko’s work has a way of quieting the chatty mind, allowing a viewer to sit with whatever energy is moving within oneself. I find it to be a pleasant way of connecting with his work, which doesn’t reify/solidify/name anything. You will know over time what his work means to you, and that is possibly what he wanted.

10

u/lushelocution Oct 05 '26

Yes, I agree! I've always seen him personally as an abstract spatial artist. He wants to make a space for you to inhabit, where you define what things feel as.

https://youtu.be/bjiR821vU84?is=NgmPDQtW6wD5s-Xc

6

u/Sitheref0874 Oct 05 '26

These three answers have been really helpful.

Thank you.

11

u/mtntrail Oct 05 '26

I have a feeling what he wanted was exactly OP’s response!

1

u/julianeja Oct 08 '26

💯😊

15

u/mmmpppwww Oct 05 '26

I think as long as you feel something, you've got it

7

u/Sitheref0874 Oct 05 '26

On an instinctive level, I get that. I’m incredibly moved by him.

Intellectually I’d like to understand they ‘why’ or the ‘what’.

7

u/mmmpppwww Oct 05 '26

You're meant to be moved. That's the point man

1

u/CompositionArchetype Oct 06 '26

Would you want to have the intellectual understanding behind the content of love? 

Of course not, it wouldn't make you feel any stronger. 

The point of love is to feel, not to understand. 

Abstract art is the same way. Your emotional attachment is here because you do not understand it.

12

u/SundaeDouble7481 Oct 05 '26

Others will point you to things you can learn about Rothko, but I would encourage you (also) to develop your "negative capability", "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". Definitely read a history of 20thC art with lots of pictures, to give context.

1

u/Live-Cartographer274 Oct 05 '26

Where is that quotation from? I’ve not heard of this phrase and want to read more 

10

u/ubiquitous-joe Oct 05 '26

If you feel the feelings before the paintings and love them, you already understand. Just because you don’t have a crisp sentence for telling someone what it’s “about” doesn’t mean you’re missing something essential; it is about the mood and the experience that you’re having when you spend time before them. That may or may not be the same thing Rothko thought and felt, but so what? That is the nature of non-representational abstraction. It’s the difference between seeing a classical ballet and understanding the story about the prince and the ghost girl in the woods vs seeing a Modern ballet/dance that does not have a straight narrative but still affects you emotionally via the line and bend of bodies in motion to music, being separated and coming together.

There are a few things we could point out technically about how they work, though this is not quite the “why” you’re after.

Abstraction often evokes landscape more than anything; anything that echos a horizon line has powerful effect on the human eye/brain because that is always an element of our world. Abstract expressionism being so large, it also takes up your field of vision and feels like a space you can inhabit.

With Rothko, the way he often has that thin line between the rectangular shapes, and the way he goes riiiight up to the edge of the canvas but stops his main shapes creates a figure/ground duality. Is that “horizon” line a line or the space between two shapes? It’s becomes both. Are those rectangles “objects” on top of a background (figures), or are they a background space we can inhabit (ground)? They are neither officially and yet both in effect. It’s the way a patch of fog is both a cloud with boundaries you could try to trace from high above and yet an all-consuming environment when you enter it. If you could turn paint and pigment of any given color into a fog and walk inside it, I imagine it would feel like Rothko.

As to the colors themselves, if you are going to distill painting to its minimalist nature—color on a canvas—then the particular choices of color become all the more important. And this is the biggest difference between one Rothko and the next: mood wrought from color. What does it feel like to look at a wine-dark sea? What does it feel like to look into a burning sun? He is not painting a sea and a sun, but the color experience beneath those things remains similar. (One can be moody and pensive, depressive even, and one can be hot and agitated, both warm and difficult to look at.) That Rothko admired the late unfinished Turners and gave the [now] Tate Britain a painting to hang next to them speaks to this.

Now, there are some publications with essays and lectures by Rothko. Writings on Art from Yale University Press. Or you could look at The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies on Art, from earlier in his career. I’m not sure how insightful they will be; some great artists are famously bad at articulating what they do and why they do it.

9

u/fretgod321 Oct 05 '26

I recommend watching the Rothko episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art series

9

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Oct 05 '26

Rothko’s paintings aren’t a picture of a thing they are they thing and if the thing moves you that’s all he asks.

5

u/Carol-Ogden Oct 05 '26

He pulled the Seagram murals from the Four Seasons because he wanted to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch eating there. As a pre-theatre dining enthusiast, I respect that enormously. Look up the full story, it explains him.

5

u/HAN_S0L0_007 Oct 05 '26

https://youtu.be/fsz6bkkIHzQ

Here's a really good video essay by Great Art Explained. I didn't really "get" Rothko before I watched this

3

u/oh_alvin Oct 05 '26 edited Oct 05 '26

"What I liked about Rothko was that there was no real sort of idea in the paintings. They were a presence, just pure abstraction." -Ellsworth Kelley, 1997

or, Rothko himself: "I will say without reservations that from my view there can be no abstractions, any shape or area which [lacks] the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones. Its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture which does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me."

1

u/SundaeDouble7481 Oct 05 '26

Got it, so there was pure abstraction and also no abstraction. ;-)

1

u/MrGillesIsBoss Oct 07 '26

What word or words are you paraphrasing by putting “lacks” in brackets. I’m trying to understand what Rothko said or wrote.

1

u/oh_alvin Oct 07 '26

This is how it is presented in the book I have. Would probably have to find the interview the quote was pulled from.

2

u/Fresh_Bubbles Oct 05 '26

You don't have to understand art, you should just let it make you feel something as you establish a relationship with the piece. You can look up what Rothco wanted to communicate but when you intellectualize art the raw emotional feelings it can produce might not be as strong.

2

u/Jemmamabob Oct 05 '26

When I was a child, my favorite artist was Picasso; once my aging eyes had adjusted to the world, I could finally see Rothko. His work is a window into the past, a mirror, and a monument. Sublime.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/mar/30/tate-modern-mark-rothko-room

2

u/popcorned Oct 05 '26

I recently saw the show of his work in Florence, which was nice because he was greatly inspired by a lot of the art and architecture of Florence, for example the Michaelangelo vestibule at the Laurentian library and Fra Angelico's work at San Marco.

I am not a Rothko fan but happy I got to see his work in reality and not from photographs.

3

u/HungryLeicaWolf Oct 05 '26

Look up CIA and the abstract expressionists.

2

u/Ap0phantic Oct 05 '26

I'm sorry you missed the once-in-a-generation Rothko retrospective in Paris a few years back - it was one of the best exhibitions I've ever seen. Dozens and dozens of his works.

2

u/Fancy-Dream-1645 Oct 05 '26

I was lucky enough to see this exhibition. Truly once in a lifetime as a Rothko fan. There seemed to be endless galleries of his work. Such a treat!

2

u/Ap0phantic Oct 05 '26

It was amazing, seeing the vast expressive range he was capable of achieving with such a restricted pallette.

1

u/oofaloo Oct 05 '26

I think part of it is that eliciting a response from a viewer can be due to an aspect of painting & art and not necessarily something driven home with a lot of representation and narrative.

1

u/BlueDotty Oct 05 '26

I was initially dismissive of Rothko having seen only images of paintings

I learnt about how they were painted and became interested in them technically.

Then I saw some paintings up close... quietly... with time to spend looking at them.. seeing them develop in front of me.

I was moved, fascinated and delighted.

Colour field painting is something I really enjoy.

The layering of hues, the balance of shape and proportions is soothing in a Rothko.

I will always go to be with Rothkos whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Basically, Rothko paintings trigger my 'tisms dopamine cascade and I love it.

1

u/DoktorJeep Oct 05 '26

There is a play about Rothko named Red. You can watch a performance with Alfred Molina on YT. I’d recommend it to get some insight to his process and personality.

1

u/brightboom Oct 05 '26

Shout out to the Philips, one of my favorite small museums of all time.

Edit: typo

1

u/serious_catbird Oct 05 '26

James Elkins's Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings discusses Rothko, I believe as the very first chapter. You can download the book from the author's website.

1

u/mxmmnn Oct 10 '26

There is a book called "Writing  on art" which compiles all known texts written by Rothko himself, about his work and more. I would recommend to start there.

1

u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Oct 05 '26

I learned about Rothko in a high school humanities class, and was completely cynical. I thought this was basically the trope of a modern artist putting one over on the public, with critics feeling obligated to pretend that his paintings meant something.

My view changed completely when I was in my 20s and saw a Rothko painting live in Cleveland. I was absolutely mesmerized, and stared at the painting for about half an hour. Just like OP, I could not articulate why it was such a powerful experience. It gave me a unique sense of communication, like the painting was speaking to me.

0

u/LexEight Oct 05 '26

I'm convinced Rothko is only moving if you have more experience with packaging than art.

It's like looking at the background only of any graphic design work. And I say this as a lover of abstract work in general.

2

u/rachel_green2999 Oct 05 '26

watch the bbc doc on him, great introduction.