Mark Rothko by Christopher Rothko

Author:Christopher Rothko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mark Rothko and Music

I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry.

This statement is perhaps Rothko’s most quoted, and it is not difficult to understand why. Beyond its immediate aesthetic appeal, it expresses a poignancy of its own that reveals my father’s poetic engagement with his subject. More crucially, however, this one sentence communicates directly not just Rothko’s aims but the level on which his paintings function to realize those aims. He is on an artistic quest, one that seeks the beauty and emotive power of other art forms. He embraces them in a way that speaks not only of a pursuit of the beautiful but also of his own dedication and sincerity in his endeavor. Painting is not some casual venture, not something that simply came to him or an avocation that he adopted. It is a mission he takes on with intentionality and a clear end in mind. And he communicates an uncompromising attitude that looks to the new in its embrace of the old.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, and I will tease apart this statement at some length because I think it is highly revealing of my father’s artistic objectives, and the emotional and intellectual impulses that drove them. Music was central to my father’s world—to his own aesthetic sensibilities certainly, but also to the structure and expressive modes he found as a painter. And, perhaps surprisingly, if we can understand a bit about how we interact with music and how it affects us, we can understand a parallel process that occurs in us with Rothko paintings (while I think much of what I will say about music applies to poetry as well, I will not be treating poetry directly, both because I know a great deal more about music but also because my father listened to music far more than he read poetry. Further, while much of the spirit I discuss here is common to music and poetry, there are particular qualities of music that offer especially intriguing parallels to Rothko paintings).

It is not uncommon for painters to embrace the other arts, to express their admiration for them, to reference them in their paintings, or to join in collaborations with artists from other disciplines. This, however, is not what Rothko is telling us. He wants to make his painting like these art forms, to incorporate their spirit, to ingest them whole and have their essences ultimately seep through the pores of his canvas. While this may sound primitive, that is the level on which desire functions and also the first level on which his work engages us.

Quite simple and beautiful on the surface, Rothko’s declaration about music and poetry is more complex and troubling when considered at greater length. For what do we make of a painter who announces that he would really rather be something else? How seriously can we take his artistic output when it would appear he is trying

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