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The National Gallery is the chosen storehouse of the Rothko family itself, and where the most significant collection of Rothko’s works and records in the world are kept. That means, among other things, a completist span of materials from earliest to latest days, and a lot of works on paper, which is what this show is. A practical point: Works on paper are vulnerable to light; for reasons of conservation, I doubt you’ll see most of these again for decades.
Rothko’s watercolors don’t enjoy the marquee treatment the oil paintings do; they’re much smaller, their colors less deep and forceful, a simple fact of the medium. But over his career, he made more than 1,000 of them; they’re illuminating in a way those big paintings, in their impenetrability, resist.
The exhibition follows a straight chronology, room by room, a by-now standard origin story trajectory, landing at the elemental purity that attended the artist’s final years until his death by suicide in 1970. But that conventional structure is revelatory: The first room anchors Rothko here on earth in the 1930s with the artists he admired; John Marin, whose furious depictions of seaside Maine he echoes in loosely brushed landscape paintings of Portland, Ore., in 1933; Henri Matisse, whose expressive figures Rothko struggled to emulate (he was never much for faces, the exhibition points out); and Paul Cézanne, a hero, with paintings of reclining bathers made in 1934, limned with murky charcoal and awash in earthy greens and browns.
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Rothko painted the last that summer in Gloucester, a guest of his friend and mentor Milton Avery, whose spare figures blocked out in primary colors gave Rothko some early food for thought. If you can’t make it to the National Gallery, you’ll be treated to a closer look next year when the Cape Ann Museum brings some of their kin north for an exhibition of Avery, Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb’s Gloucester sojourns. I was as surprised as anyone when I first learned of Rothko painting the craggy shores of Gloucester’s Rocky Neck, or the soft sands of Good Harbor beach.
In Paris, Rothko’s early figuration sounds mostly expository and obligatory, but here, it snaps into place as an essential launching pad. No artist of his era feels more apart from art history, arriving at a place that belonged only to him. But nothing comes from nothing, and the watercolor works, by their nature, capture him in experimental phases, sketching out his future self anchored in art historical reference. A second gallery, aptly titled “Breakthrough,” is a tantalizing view into Rothko crossing over, toeing into the unknown.
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His early abstractions, made in the mid-1940s, can feel like microbial ecosystems that recall Kandinsky and Miro. “Entombment I,” 1946, ashen and menacing, with bloody stains seeping through the dark, refers to ancient Greek pottery depicting burial rites. In “Omen,” 1946, a spare cluster of pale, tight arcs on a gray background rubs up against a burst of crimson, the artist’s abstraction of the Old Master convention of a bloodied Christ being loosed from the cross.
In the aftermath of the war and Holocaust, Rothko believed, trauma on a scale never before imagined demanded a new visual language. That idea was the underpinning of Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist cohort, but none achieved it with his staggering presence. Here, we have liftoff: The next gallery is titled “Transition,” and the first appearance of those oppressive color banks — hovering stains of gray, chartreuse, and brown on a yellow ground; it’s called, like everything else to come, “Untitled,” 1948, a mode that would sustain him for more than 20 years.
Herein lies the enigma of Rothko, at least for me; the exhibition has barely begun, and a half-dozen galleries await. But is it also kind of over? For people who have to put words to it, like me, yes, kind of; the mature Rothko is an almost indescribable experience. Many see the work as almost spiritual, a purely experiential endeavor that words fail. (That hasn’t stopped plenty of us from trying.) But the thick middle of the exhibition, replete with soft fogs of color in varying hues and proportions, conjures an atmospheric realm apart from the standard practice of exhibition-going.
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I’ve heard some call it “aesthetic experience,” a low thrum of fascination somewhere deeper and more primal than conscious thought; it’s about presence, the irreconcilable alchemy of pigment and paper transcending a material world. Some get that from Rembrandt, or Velazquez — a mystic energy that defies the two dimensions of a painted surface. The Abstract Expressionists were aiming for that feeling: an art more pure and powerful than a picture of a thing could ever be.
Most didn’t get there, at least for me — Jackson Pollock’s splattery swirls feel more gimmicky and desperate every time I see them, to pick an obvious one. But Rothko achieved something closest to it; whether it was what he intended, I’m not sure. “I’m the most violent of all the American painters,” he once said. “Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.” Am I wrong not to see it that way? I don’t think so. For all the bluster, Rothko’s appeal to the viewer was to remain open, to let his paintings work on you over time. More than any I know, they do.
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There’s a toughness to them, from which Rothko himself needed refuge. After huge commissions — for a chapel in Houston for the Menil family in 1967, or his Seagram murals for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in 1958, a commission he came to rue as a stage set for louche business lunches for the city’s elite — he would retreat to his watercolors. Small and intimate, they feel immediate and expressive.
In the spring of 1968, just two years before he died, Rothko suffered an aortic aneurysm He spent the summer recovering in Provincetown, and produced more than 120 paintings that year. He had hardly made any watercolors in a decade, but he was alive with it, maybe feeling the ticking clock. Many of the paintings from that time burn with fiery orange and yellow, a fury of defiance.
In the last two years of his life, he made more than 420 paintings on paper, and just 30 on canvas. Is it even possible to see the work from 1969, darkening into greens, browns, and blacks, as denouement, a turn toward the void? That’s the standard line: Rothko charting a path to the end. But the show ends with a final experiment, the artist forging new paths while closing the circle; a last gallery, called “Coda,” contains a suite of soft-edged monochrome paintings in pale gray and blues, lavenders and earthy browns. They feel grounded in a way his masterfully oblique works from a decade before do not — a reconnection, at the end, to a knowable world of sky and sand and earth.
MARK ROTHKO: PAINTINGS ON PAPER
Through March 31. At National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 202-737-4215, www.nga.gov
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
