Rothko and the Color Field

By the late 1940s, Mark Rothko had stopped painting figures. He had spent the previous decade working through Surrealist-inflected mythological scenes — biomorphic shapes, totemic figures loosely descended from classical subjects — before arriving, around 1946, at a transitional group of works he called multiforms: loose, softly bordered rectangles of color floating against a stained ground, with no horizon, no figure, no title pointing back to myth. Within two years the multiforms had resolved into the format Rothko would work for the rest of his life — two or three luminous rectangles, their edges feathered rather than drawn, stacked vertically on a large canvas soaked in thinned oil paint.

Color as the whole subject

Rothko insisted, more forcefully than almost any other painter of his generation, that his paintings were not about color in a decorative or formal sense. He resisted being called an abstractionist and disliked the anodyne label "color-field painter" that critics increasingly applied to him and to Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. For Rothko the rectangles were vehicles for what he called basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom — and he wanted viewers to stand close, inside the painting's space, so that its scale would overwhelm rather than decorate. He was known to ask galleries to hang his works low and to light them dimly, so that the canvases would seem to emit their own light rather than reflect a room's.

The mechanism by which he achieved this was exacting despite its apparent simplicity. Rothko thinned his pigments and applied them in thin, built-up layers, so that a red rectangle might carry a ghost of orange or maroon beneath it, and the boundary between one color field and the next would breathe rather than cut. The scale of the canvases, often well over seven feet tall, was deliberate: Rothko wanted the painting's edge to fall outside the viewer's peripheral vision, so that the color became an environment rather than an object seen from a distance.

The Seagram commission

The clearest test of these ambitions came in 1958, when Rothko accepted a commission to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building on Park Avenue. He worked for months on a suite of deep red and maroon canvases, adopting a more somber, architectural palette than his earlier work — some of the compositions echo the shape of doors and windows rather than the floating rectangles of his 1950s paintings. Then, reportedly after dining at the restaurant and recoiling at the idea of his paintings serving as backdrop to wealthy patrons at an expensive meal, Rothko withdrew from the commission and returned the fee. He kept the canvases, and years later, in 1969, arranged for a group of them to go to the Tate Gallery in London, where a dedicated room now displays them under low light, close to how Rothko wanted his work seen.

Legacy and the room as chapel

Rothko's late ambitions culminated in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, completed in 1971 (the year after his death), a non-denominational space where fourteen of his darkest, near-monochrome canvases surround the viewer entirely. The chapel makes explicit what the earlier color-field paintings had implied all along: that Rothko intended color relationships to function almost liturgically, as an experience closer to contemplation than to looking at a picture.

Art history has since folded Rothko into the broader story of postwar American abstraction alongside Pollock, de Kooning, and Newman, but his particular claim — that saturated, softly bordered color could carry the emotional weight of tragic drama without any figure, narrative, or symbol — remains distinctive. Where Pop artists of the following decade would insist that meaning lived in the commercial and reproducible image, Rothko insisted, to the end, that meaning lived in the wordless encounter between a viewer and a field of color large enough to fill the eye.