Rothko: Portland Art Museum

Entrance to the Portland Rothko Exhibit (left), Rothko Self-Portrait –1936 (middle), Hierarchical Birds – 1934 (right)

Watching People Watching Rothko at the Portland Art Museum, May 2012

The exhibition Mark Rothko was at the Portland Art Museum from Feb 18 to May 27, 2012. We caught the exhibition in its last few days. The exhibition featured 45 works by the Russian-American artist Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970). Rothko (born Marcus Yakovlevich Rothokowitz) emigrated from Russia (now Latvia) at the age of 10 and came to Portland, Oregon. He would return to Portland several times throughout his life. Rothko’s first museum exhibition was hosted by the Portland Art Museum in 1933-1934. And, the recent exhibition is the first retrospective of his work staged in Portland.

The exhibit was compact, with just a few interconnected rooms, but it did not disappoint. In the exhibit, Rothko’s works were arranged chronologically so you could really see how his style changed, from figurative, to surrealism, to transitional “multiform” paintings, and finally to his “late” period of stacked, translucent rectangular forms.

We were unfamiliar with some of Rothko’s early work, in particular his subway series with their attenuated figures and bleak settings. And even more surprising were the works in the early 1940s that deal with myth. An exhibition description described this Rothko period as

1941-1943 “Works closely with [Adolph] Gottlieb to develop an aesthetic based on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian myth. They share an interest in Jungian and eternal symbols, the power of myth, and psychological content in art.”

It was fun to see and perhaps would have been pleasing for Rothko to see people standing before his late period works, lost in the expanse of color. There is something undeniably powerful about the floating color fields. In the book Mark Rothko by Jeffrey Weiss et al., Rothko is reported on one occasion to have advocated a viewing distance of eighteen inches. For some of Rothko’s works the effect can be like getting lost in the color.

After the exhibition we purchased the book The Artist’s Reality - Philosophies of Art. It is a collection of essays by Rothko discovered in 1988 and eventually organized and edited by his son Christopher Rothko and published in 2004. The essays are estimated to have been written in between 1940 - 1941. In the essays we get a peek at Rothko’s ideas on art, beauty, myth, and more. We are warned in the introduction that “Rothko has no patience for anything that did not aspire to the highest ideals.” and “[h]is own feeling of deprivation adds an extra bite to his words.” For example, in the essay Art as a Form of Action, he states: “In fact, the man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry so that he has neither time nor energy to occupy himself with any other needs of the human organism is by far a greater escapist than the one who developed his art.” (We read this as we sat, early one morning before heading off to one of those wheels.)

Honestly, the thoughts expressed in the essay are beyond us and are for scholars of Rothko. However, the introduction is a good read and filled in some of the background we were missing. We also suggest watching Simon Schama’s Power of Art (2007) Rothko episode.

In the end, our reaction to Rothko’s late pieces remains the same as the day we walked into the Rothko Rom at the Tate Gallery: wonder, sadness, hope, peace, agitation - emotion and feeling - not really thinking, but feeling and emotion. Yes, at times, the colors are pleasing to look at but that’s more an aside. Hopefully, Rothko would be pleased. Schama in the Rothko episode says this of the viewer’s reaction: “emotionally stirring, sensually addictive”.

To visit the exhibition, we took a day trip to from Seattle to Portland, following the bone-rattling and noisy Interstate-5 for a couple of hours each way. A bright spot was finding a nice French restaurant in Olympia called La Petite Maison where we ate at on the way back.

Milton Avery - Bathers, Coney Island – 1934, An Important Influence on Rothko (left), In the Middle of a Red Canvas (right)

Entrance to a Subway – 1938 (left), Subway c. - 1937 (right)

Three Rothko Works Showing the Progression of His Work in One View (left), Untitled 1941-2 (right)

The Artist’s Reality – Philosophies of Art Front (left), Back (right)

Rothko on the Moors - Glaisdale Moor

View on Glaisdale Moor


A Simplification of the View


Maybe it was the visit to the Tate in London days earlier and sitting in the Rothko (Room 3) or maybe it was just the environment, but on the moors I saw color and line. Swaths of green farmland in the distance, bands of purple (blooming heather) and reddish-green, mottled patches (bilberry) in the foreground, occasional blotches of off-white (sheep) floating in between the two, and gray-blue skies hanging over it all. Often devoid of people and with constant blocks of color and slowly changed site lines, the moors I saw evoked in my mind Rothko’s signature style, his late period. In his late period, his large canvases follow “a compositional structure that Rothko explored for twenty–three years beginning in 1947. Narrowly separated, rectangular blocks of color hover in a column against a colored ground. Their edges are soft and irregular, so that when Rothko uses closely related tones, the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance.” [The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights]

In the Tate Rothko Room 3 there is a somber atmosphere. The walls are gray and the lighting dimmed to display Rothko’s large canvases in maroon, dark red and black colors. I sit for a while. Into my ears, courtesy of the audio guide, a bit of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel – Why Patterns? is playing. Ah, I think I understand this thing called art for a moment, but it is fleeting. Back to reality and Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere degli stracci or Venus of the Rags.

During the Wainwright Coast to Coast walk, the Rothko moments came in the North Yorkshire Moors as we climbed up and down over moors like Danby and Glaisdale moor (day 11) which I remember in particular as we made our way from Blakey Ridge to Grosmont . On the previous day on our way from Osmotherly to Blakey Ridge we went up over Carlton Moor past a (former) gliding club hut and then down to the Lord Stones Café (for a bacon and egg sandwich lunch!). The scenery was more spectacular than I had anticipated.

Part of the challenge on this trip was using my Canon Powershot SD1400 effectively. Perhaps it’s a user issue, but I couldn’t get the camera to capture the big open skies and expanses of heath. The camera seems to work well for macro shots and well-lit, smaller-framed shots. For the landscape shots, I found I gravitated to the Miniature Effect which the manual says “blurs chosen portions in the top and bottom of an image to produce the effect of a miniature model.” It tends to heighten the colors as well. My Canon Rothko effect; it captured the scene the way that spoke to me about what I saw.

The Rothko Room 3, Tate Modern

The Cover of Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel – Why Patterns?

Tate Modern, Venus of the Rags


View From Glaisdale Moor in the Great Fryup Beck