Rothko - Part Three

OK, I admit that I've been procrastinating with this post. There's so much to it and I want to do right by it, but it's a lot of work. Sigh...

(Note: In case you're beginning here with Park Three (Parts One and Two are below), this series of posts on Rothko is based on Mark Rothko: A Biography by James E. B. Breslin. You can also start reading my Rothko posts using the links at right for each of the six parts under "Favorite Posts.")

Making Connections
So to return to the story, when Rothko and his first wife, Edith, separated, Rothko told Hedda Sterne that it was like "pulling the skin from his cheek: it was so painful." He checked into a hospital and suffered through a period of depression and hypochondria, then made a visit back to his family in Portland. This was a significant trip because during this trip Rothko met people who changed the course of his life and work.

After Portland, Rothko detoured to the Bay Area, where he met Clyfford Still, who later became a good friend and a major influence on his artistic development. He then went on to Los Angeles where he made a connection that led to an introduction to Peggy Guggenheim's art advisor, Howard Putzel. Howard was apparently the motivating force behind Peggy's promotion of young New York artists at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York. Rothko first showed there with an important group of American and European artists and then had a solo show in January 1945, his first solo show in more than a dozen years. Breslin says that the show was "widely and quite favorably" reviewed but didn't have the critical impact that Pollock's 1943 exhibit had had. It did "establish Rothko's place as an important figure in his generation of painters."

"Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea", 1944, oil on canvas, approximately 6' H x 7' W.

Rothko showed 15 of his myth-based, automatic drawing-inspired oil paintings. One of these works was "Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea." Breslin calls it his "largest, most ambitious, and in Rothko's view the 'most important' work he had so far attempted." Before reading Breslin's book, this is the only painting of Rothko's that I had ever seen from the body of work that he painted prior to his mature style. It usually looks a lot more dingy and brown, but is the one painting that all the art histories show. This painting was purchased by Peggy Guggenheim as the token piece that she bought from each one-man show in her gallery, and it is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art. Breslin says that Rothko sold only three paintings from the show, one being Slow Swirl, and that the total he received for all three was $265! Isn't that incredible?

(Slow Swirl did not go from Peggy to MoMA. She loaned it to the San Francisco MoMA and then gave it to them in 1946. In 1962 Rothko exchanged another painting for Slow Swirl, which he then gave to his second wife, Mell, and hung it in their living room. Mell had watched him paint it and felt that it was dedicated to her. This painting meant a lot to both of them, and it was donated to MoMA, NY after Mell's death.)

Rothko Remarries

Rothko's second wife was very different from his first. Mary Alice (called "Mell") Beistle was from Ohio, a Christian, a graduate of Skidmore with a major in fine and applied art and 19 years younger than her husband. (His first wife, Edith, had been nine years younger than him.) Rothko said of Mell: "I was a foreigner and she made an American out of me." The couple married in March 1945 after knowing each other for just a few months and only six months after Rothko's divorce.

Mell had a much warmer and friendly personality than Edith, idolized Rothko as an artistic genius (she called him "Rothko") and was willing to support him in ways that Edith had not. Rothko was able to leave his teaching job and paint full time, and he had a wife who was "young, marvelous to look at, supported the family, managed the household, and adulated [her] husband, the Artist."

The Breakthrough

Beginning in 1945, Rothko agonizingly worked to abandon the drawing in his paintings that represented myth, symbol, landscape and the figure. "I have assumed for myself the problem of further concretizing my process," he wrote to Barnett Newman in the summer of 1945. He said that developing this new work was frustrating but exhilarating because he had to endure "a series of stumblings toward a clearer issue." Rothko struggled to develop the new work and didn't exhibit it for a couple of years because he was so unsure of it. This work came to be called "the multiforms", although this was not Rothko's term for it.

"Number 9", 1948 (from National Gallery site)

You can see that line has just about disappeared and that soft areas of color seem to move about freely in space. Also, the palette is limited and the color saturated. No brown or black here.

Another closely-related piece from 1948 - this one has no number and is just untitled (from National Gallery site)

Rothko said that he thought of the fuzzy rectangles as "performers" in "an unknown adventure in an unknown space." They were not meant to represent anything in particular but in them one could recognize "the principle and passion of organisms." Breslin says that Rothko was "seeking to induce a state of consciousness prior to, and more fluid than, the comforts of recognition." But were they stand-ins for the artist himself? Rothko wrote in 1947-48: "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame."

Influence of Clyfford Still

Many histories of Abstract Expressionism claim that Still inspired Rothko to leave Surrealism and break through to the multiforms. Still was living in New York during the summer of 1945, and Rothko visited Still's studio to see his work that had moved away from Surrealism to encompass large-scale, non-figurative works with flat areas of color. While Still may have encouraged Rothko to use color differently, Rothko's works are soft, seductive, translucent and atmospheric, while Still's are sharp-edged, opaque and thickly painted. Elmer Bischoff said "Rothko voiced the hope of breaking through solitude, whereas Still emphasized the valiant and solitary stand the artist must take for the sake of his own integrity."

Clyfford Still, "1949 No. 1", oil on canvas, 105" x 81" (from Clyfford Still Museum)

Rothko had a show in the summer of 1946 at the San Francisco Museum of Art - whether Still had anything to do with this, Breslin doesn't say. However, he does say that Rothko arranged for Still to show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1946 and wrote the catalog essay for Still's show. Rothko acted as Still's New York representative, installing his shows, storing his work and keeping Still posted on the New York artworld. Still got Rothko a teaching job at the California School of Fine Arts in the summers of 1947 and 1949 and let Rothko use his studio. (This according to The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism by Susan Landauer, which I had in my studio weighing down some wood and happened to pick up yesterday.) Rothko was popular at the school and seemed to embody the sophisticated, witty, New York intellectual painter. His 1947 discussion class drew "capacity crowds" and his 1949 slide lectures on the New York art scene were a hit. Rothko's own work apparently influenced students at the school, who began making work in the pinks and blues that Rothko favored at the time.

Under Still's influence, Rothko abandoned titles for his work so that "all recognizable associations [could] be eliminated." He first began a numbering system, but later stopped doing that and just left his paintings untitled. (I have to say that while I understand that some artists don't want to give viewers any hint of their paintings' meanings, etc., I dislike this practice because it's too confusing to refer to the work. Come on, if you make more than one painting, couldn't you at least give it a number!)

Still and Rothko had a major falling out in the early 1950s, but while it lasted, their friendship was deep and influential. Still described it this way:

"We were complete opposites. He was a big man. He would sit like a Buddha, chain-smoking. We came from different sides of the world. He was thoroughly immersed in Jewish culture. But we had gown up only a few hundred miles apart. We had read many of the same things. And we could walk through the park together and talk about anything." (quoted in Breslin)

"Arriving at His Big Style"

Rothko's work in the summer of 1949 in San Francisco moved away from the multiforms and closer to his mature or signature style. Rothko said he was "arriving at his big style" and that Still had been "instrumental" in helping him to get there. During the winter of 1949-50, Rothko arrived at the "billowy rectangles of luminous color stacked one on top of the other."

Untitled, 1949 (from the National Gallery site)

Notice how the edges of the forms have been liberated from the edges of the canvas so that the rectanges are floating free.


No. 10, 1950, 90 1/4" x 57 5/8", owned by MoMA, NY, gift of Philip Johnson (from the National Gallery site)

Betty Parsons Gallery
Rothko had been showing with Peggy Guggenheim, but when her advisor, Howard Putzel, left her to establish his own 67 Gallery, Rothko hoped to move with him. However, Putzel died suddenly and Peggy announced that she was returning to Europe. Rothko, Newman and Still joined Pollock at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the fall of 1946. Betty referred to them as her "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." This move gave Rothko, at the age of 44 and after 20 years of painting, his first real dealer. He signed a contract with Parsons to give her 33 percent of all gallery sales and 15 percent of studio sales (standard at the time!). Between 1947 and 1951, Parsons gave him five annual one-man shows. He also showed in seven shows at the Whitney between 1945 and 1950.



"White Center", 1950, private collection (from the National Gallery site)

I love the color in this one and the way the ground changes from red at the top to a terra-cotta-ish ochre at the bottom.

I'll leave you with an image of Rothko in his studio on West 53rd Street in 1952 taken by photographer Kay Bell Reynal.

Still to Come

Rothko's painting methods; a history of his sales figures; when art became a commodity; what is the meaning of art and why artists paint; how much influence viewers have on a painting; the story of the Four Seasons or Seagrams murals; the Rothko Chapel; Rothko's bad habits, illness and suicide; the Rothko foundation and Rothko's children; Bernard Reis and the lawsuit; Rothko's book.

Who Was That Woman?

As you may recall, I've been reading that interminable book on Rothko, and after several years (slight exaggeration), I'm about half way through. You'll be glad to know that he's finally breaking through to his signature style, and he's nearly the Rothko that we who live in the future know.

Anyway, I came to the part where the AbEx group that Rothko belonged to sent a letter of protest about the overly-conservative jury appointed to select work for the Metropolitan Museum in 1950. They protested that the jury was biased against the "advanced art" (namely Abstract Expressionism) then being made in New York that should be made part of the Museum's collection.

That letter actually prompted a front-page story in the NY Times (can you imagine that happening today?) and inspired a story in Life Magazine in January 1951 that termed the group "The Irascibles." Life included what became an iconic photo of 15 of the AbExers.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne. Photo by Nina Leen in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.

So I was thinking that I would do a post about two women gallerists who promoted Rothko - Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons. As far as I can tell from reading the Rothko book and several others, Peggy and Betty were responsible for establishing Abstract Expressionism and launching the careers of many important artists. While Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, originally specialized in Surrealism and was oriented mainly toward European artists, it also introduced and continued to show work by Rothko, Pollock, Cornell, Newman, Gotlieb and many others beginning in 1942. Peggy had first had a gallery in London (Guggenheim Jeune), but was forced by the war to close it and move back to the U.S. After the war, Peggy closed her New York gallery and returned to Europe in 1947, finally settling in Venice.

Betty Parsons was an artist herself and not trained as a gallerist. She took over most of the American artists who had been with Peggy and established a gallery that eventually became very sucessful, operating until her death in 1982. Helen Frankenthaler said of her, "Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed."

I may still write more about Peggy and Betty, who so vitally served this 99.9% male group of Abstract Expressionist painters, but meanwhile, I became interested in Hedda Sterne, the lone woman in the Irascibles portrait, who stands so prominently above the men seated below her.

Hedda Sterne was born Hedwig Lindenberg in 1910 in Bucharest, Romania to a non-religious Jewish family. She escaped the Nazi onrush by way of Portugal and arrived in the U.S. in 1941, where her first husband, childhood friend and fellow Romanian, Frederick Sterne, had already established himself.

Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne, photo by George Platt Lynes, c. 1944-45.

Her second husband, whom she married in 1944, was Saul Steinberg, artist and illustrator, made famous by his New Yorker magazine covers.

Iconic New Yorker cover from March 1976 by Saul Steinberg, "View of the World from 9th Avenue"

Hedda's appearance in the Irascibles photo had nothing to do with Saul Steinberg or anyone else but herself. She was an artist who had shown with the Abstract Expressionists and signed the letter of protest, but she refused to categorize her work as Abstract Expressionism. She "grew up with Surrealism" thanks to an artist friend and studied art in Vienna, Bucharest and Paris. She exhibited collages in the "Surindependents" exhibition of 1938 in Paris, where Jean Arp saw her work and arranged to have one of her collages sent to the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London.

Throughout her life she experimented with various subjects, mediums and techniques, sometimes prompted by observation and other times by ideas, but "at all times I have been moved...by the music of the way things are...And through all this pervades my feeling that I am only one small speck (hardly an atom) in the uninterrupted flux of the world around me." (This quote is from a wonderful article and interview by Joan Simon in Art in America from February 2007 when Sterne was age 96 .) "Uninterrupted Flux" provided the title of a traveling show and catalogue that organized her varied career and work into thematic and chronological groupings.

"Further I", 1984, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 72" x 52." (This image is from a 2007 article in The Brooklyn Rail.)

Sterne said that she had originally been interested in architecture but that she was bad at math so she studied art instead.

"Machine 5" from 1950. "I had a feeling that machines are unconscious self-portraits of people's psyches: the grasping, the wanting, the aggression that's in a machine. That's why I was interested to paint them. And I called them "anthropographs"--maybe it was pretentious thinking [laughs]." (from the Joan Simon interview in Art in America)

Sterne went her own way throughout her career: "I took it for granted that art is essentially an act of freedom. You react to the world totally freely. I met many artists in New York who believed progress is linear, from figure to abstract. In my work I never followed that idea." (from the Joan Simon interview)

Untitled, 1968

Photos of work by Sterne are difficult to find on the internet. Although she drew and painted portraits throughout her life, I could not find any to show here, but just from these three images, you can see how varied her work is. And yet, she is known not for her work but for her appearance in that Irascibles photo, which must have been very annoying.

From everything that I could find, Hedda Sterne is still alive. She would now be aged 99. During the interview that Joan Simon did with her in 2006 when Sterne was 96, she referred to her macular degeneration that began in 1997 causing her to stop painting and the stroke she suffered in 2004 that ended her drawing. She was then mostly blind and able to read for only 15 or 20 minutes at a time with a machine.

Joan Simon asked Sterne how she spent her days, and her reply was so evocative and especially meaningful to me because of my mother's age and infirmity. It gave me greater insight into the feelings of someone who is so old but still has her mental capacity and ability to express herself:

"Now that I am so old and incapacitated, I don't do anything with great enthusiasm. You know, thinking, dreaming, musing become essential occupations. I am watching my life. As if I'm not quite in it, I watch it from the outside. Because after so many years of working unceasingly, and enthusiastically, being idle is a tremendous effort of concentration and adjustment.

The luck is that there is less energy. That's a compensation. It makes it easier. Just sitting. I saw peasants in Romania, you know, on Sunday, when they get up all summer at 4 and work incessantly until noon, let's say. And Sunday they just sit, and their resting is so active - like an activity, resting. It's a beauty to behold, you know. It's not just doing nothing. It's being and existing in a certain way. In a way old age is a little bit like that. It has its beauties."