My initial exposure to Mark Rothko was through a friend who recommended I read his favorite play, Red by John Logan. The play captures the interactions between Rothko and his assistant during the artist’s work on a series of murals for the New York Four Seasons Restaurant. As the relationship between the two men plays out over the two years Rothko worked on his murals, they challenge each other with questions about what the meaning of art is and what role it should serve in the world, while also analyzing the complexities of the relationship between creation and creator.
Mark Rothko the artist, born as Markus Rothkowitz, was born in Dvinsk, Russia to a Jewish family, and the family immigrated to Oregon in 1913. He won a scholarship to Yale, but he dropped out after two years and moved to New York to pursue a career in art. He began working with Max Weber at the Art Students’ League, changed his name to Mark Rothko, and created works influenced by Cezanne, Avery, and other painters he learned about in his studies. He tried his hand at surrealism, depicting ancient myths as universal symbols of human tragedy. Rothko was fascinated by the human experience, and this fascination intensified when he and his contemporaries read lots of Nietzsche and Jung during WWII. Host of the Art Assignment Sarah Green states that “Rothko and other artists of the time thought that following artistic tradition was not only irrelevant but irresponsible.” Rothko began creating large, geometric, abstract paintings consisting solely of rectangles of color. His paintings showcased color without any narrative structure, and color was “the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer,” according to Rothko. The depth of his colors cannot be captured with images online, and I haven’t been lucky enough to see a Rothko in person yet. He was commissioned to create murals for a chapel in Texas as well as the aforementioned series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant. The paintings meant to go in the restaurant were going to be a wide array of reds, designed to make the consumers in the restaurant feel trapped and oppressed. Rothko ended up giving the paintings to a museum instead. He controlled the conditions in which his paintings were viewed to ensure that the viewer had a totally transcendent experience. Rothko was deeply troubled, and after a life riddled with mental and physical health problems, he shot himself in front of an unfinished painting. Today, he is remembered for pioneering abstract expressionism, and Kaufman might even call him a “big C” creative. 
Readers of John Logan’s Red encounter Rothko and his assistant Ken in the midst of his work on the paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant. Rothko the character is prickly and temperamental, but the play provides incredible insight into his tortured creative process. Rothko the character obsessed about creating places within his paintings or within the context of his paintings viewed in conjunction because he wanted the viewer to remain in a space to allow the color to move. Rothko understands that art needs a viewer, asking glibly if his paintings “pulse” when they are alone. He resents the idea of his work being called beautiful, loudly proclaiming that “[he is] here to stop [our] hearts...to make [us] think…[he is] not here to make pretty pictures.” Rothko and Ken barrel into an argument regarding who is good enough to consume Rothko’s work, or even art in general. Rothko recognizes that art needs a viewer, but he laments that selling one of his paintings “is like sending a blind child into a room full of razor blades. It’s going to get hurt, and it’s never been hurt before, it doesn’t know what hurt is.” Ken quips that Rothko would gladly spend the rest of his days lecturing next to his paintings, but at some point the art must speak for itself. Rothko the character then strives ceaselessly for the power of his creation to go beyond the space and create an experience, confronting universal human tragedy and drama in its rawest forms.
In Rothko the character and the artist, we see the indelible mark the burden of the creative product leaves on the creator. He was frenzied, intense, and strong-willed and he wanted his creations to wholly envelop the viewers in an immersive experience. He did not title most of his paintings, finding words overly complicated and silence to be incredibly “accurate.” Rothko conveyed depth and profundity in his works. He argued that “a painting is not about an experience, it is an experience.” In the interplay between viewer and artist and creation (even simply readers of the play, indirectly consuming his art), the art finally speaks for itself in the place created among the three.
Works Cited:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v1mBepDlOw
https://www.nga.gov/features/mark-rothko.html
Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1–12.
Logan, J. (2011). Red. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
I find it fascinating that Rothko was so incredibly aware of his audience and their experience of taking in his works. This really demonstrates the interplay of a creative person's process and product with the field, the people who are going to be taking in the product itself. It is also a very interesting depiction of Rothko being so protective of his works, which speaks to the intense emotions he must have been infusing his product with and the high standards he held his product to.
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