Rothko on Rothko

...cult to countenance—was his insistent claim that he was not in any sense an abstract painter...

...It was a claim that, inevitably, baffled the public, infuriated the critics, and left many of his cohort in the Abstract Expressionist movement wondering what he was talking about...

...Suffice it to say that Rothko's pictorial talents were far greater than his intellectual command of what those talents produced, and his work will continue to be admired long after his muddled account of their alleged meaning has been forgotten...

...My present paintings are realistic...

...by HILTON KRAMER The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), whose Writings on Art is now published in an austere, unillustrated edition, was one of the most remarkable artists of his generation: the Abstract Expressionist generation that changed the course of modern Western painting...

...Yet it was his fate, in the mundane realm of modern earthly life, to become a casualty of his own tragic illusions...

...We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject is valid which is tragic and timeless...

...It was when he began to claim that "my new areas of color are things" and that "the shapes in the later canvases were new substitutes for the figures" that a certain skepticism began to be felt about all the later work, and skepticism turned into sheer bafflement and rejection when he insisted that the abstract shapes were figures, adding that "abstract art never interested me...

...And if others did not see in his paintings what he claimed to see, that, too, hardly mattered...

...After all, they had risked a great deal in abandoning the safe haven of representational painting for the unknown consequences of this plunge into abstraction...

...Rothko firmly believed in the reality of the "subjects," "figures," and "things" that he attributed to his abstract paintings...

...For Rothko, the self and its attributes, real or imagined, were the primary constituents of reality...

...This was anything but a ruse or a pose...

...Of course, it is not uncommon for artists to believe that their work is misunderstood...

...As I am not in the business of psychoanalyzing the minds of the painters I write about, I shall not attempt to explore the causes of Rothko's curious predicament...

...Yet here was one of their most esteemed fellow abstractionists insisting that he had never been an abstract painter—and he underscored the point by ridiculing certain types of abstraction that were unlike his own...

...I always painted realistically...

...He was also one of the most troubled artists of his time—a man at odds with society, with his fellow artists, with his medium, and, most tragically, with himself...

...After all, wasn't the entire history of modernist art a chronicle of its miscomprehension by the public and its critics...

...What existed beyond the self was scarcely more than a featureless void...

...There is no such thing as good painting about nothing," he proclaimed...

...The grandest of these illusions—and the most diffiHilton Kramer, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, is the author, most recently, of The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War...

...But it is nonetheless rare for an artist of Rothko's stature to make such a public display of his incomprehension of his own accomplishment...

...What has to be understood about this insistent mischaracterization of his own work is that Rothko's thinking was not only deeply subjective— the same could be said of many artists—but that, in his case, the artist's fundamental beliefs were also radically solipsistic...

...In the heyday of Rothko's success, from the late 1940s to the '60s, when his command of color was at its peak of achievement, at once highly seductive and spiritual in feeling, claims of this sort could be more or less taken in stride...

...Tragedy—in the Ancient Greek sense—was, indeed, the kind of exalted achievement that Rothko fervently aspired to in his painting...

...I am not a formalist...