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NARRATOR: You see a painting of a hazy rectangle
of color stacked on top of another hazy rectangle
of color.
And you think to yourself, oh right, a Rothko.
I know that guy.
But do you know that guy?
Why those hazy rectangles?
And why should I care?
This is the case for Mark Rothko.
Marcus Rothkowitz was born in 1903 to a Jewish family
into Dvinsk, Russia.
They immigrated to Portland, Oregon in 1913,
but his father died just months after.
Marcus was a good student and won a scholarship
to Yale, where he did well and discovered
his leftist political leanings.
But he dropped out in his second year and moved to New York.
It was there he set his mind to becoming an artist
and studied at the Art Students League under Max Weber
and learned about Cubism and Matisse
and the German expressionists.
In the 1930s, he made paintings influenced
by Milton Avery and Matisse.
He changed his name to Rothko in 1940, and by the mid '40s,
was trying out a little surrealism
with works like this and this that
drew from classical methods, tapping them as symbols
to discuss human tragedy.
He also copied Joan Miro a bit by making pieces like this,
and Max Ernst a bit with pieces like this.
He and his buddy Adolph Gottlieb were
reading a bunch of Nietzsche and Jung at the time
and thinking about the unconscious.
With Fascism rampant in Europe and World War II
underway, Rothko and other artists at the time
thought that following artistic traditions was not
only irrelevant, but irresponsible.
He and Gottlieb write a letter to "The New York Times"
in June of 1943 saying, "There is no such thing
as good painting about nothing.
We favor the simple expression of complex thought."
Rothko wanted to answer the big questions,
and he was trying to find his own way to do that.
Large, flat, misty areas of color
started appearing in his paintings.
The works became more and more reduced
and simplified and geometric until he went
completely abstract in 1947.
By 1950, he had found his jam, and then
he just kept on doing it.
At the time, Rothko's paintings were utterly new.
Before then, color was usually tied to narrative content.
But Rothko was asking color alone to draw out emotion.
Yes, he did basically the same thing again and again from 1949
until his death in 1970.
But for him, it was an extremely useful and seemingly
inexhaustible structure within which
he said he could deal "with human emotion;
with the human drama, as much as I
could possibly experience it."
He said this style offered him "the elimination
of all obstacles between the painter and the idea,
and between the idea and the observer."
By getting rid of anything that triggered history or memory
or narrative or even geometry, he
was trying to create an overwhelming sensory experience
for the viewer through monumentality, simplicity,
and stillness.
Many have described standing before a Rothko
as a religious experience.
He would layer glazes of color to build
hues so deep and rich that they seemed to glow, something
Renaissance artists like Titian and Giorgione also
did to great effect.
The symmetry of Rothko's work also connects it
to religious painting.
Collector Dominique de Menil said
Rothko's paintings evoke "the tragic mystery
of our perishable condition.
The silence of God.
The unbearable silence of God."
In 1964, de Menil and her husband John
commissioned Rothko to paint a set of murals
for an octagonal chapel in Houston, Texas, which
you can visit today.
The murals are somber, using dark maroon, purplish red,
and black.
With these he wanted to create a sense of enclosure
and a space for meditation.
Rothko was a deeply troubled and depressive man.
He took his work very seriously and spent
a great deal of time and focus and angst
in creating each of them.
In 1958 he was asked to create a set of murals for the Four
Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building in New York.
Calling it "A place where the richest bastards in New York
will come to feed and show off," he set to his task
using a dark palette and planned for the enormous paintings
to hang oppressively overhead, wanting
to make the viewers feel they are trapped in a room where
all the doors and windows are bricked up so that all
they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.
But he eventually decided to hold back the paintings
and instead gave them to the Tate in 1969,
where they still hang today.
Rothko strictly controlled the environment of his paintings,
demanding they be shown in low light,
in groups, encountered at close quarters,
and never mixed with work by other artists.
He did this not to be difficult, but because he cared deeply
that you have an immersive, transcendent experience.
You're not looking at the paintings.
You're with them and within them.
More than anything, Rothko wanted
to make you feel something, to encounter the undefinable,
to stare into the void, to confront
universal human tragedy.
This isn't painting about nothing.
It's painting about everything.
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