Review: Mark Rothko at the Academy Art Museum

People have wept on seeing Mark Rothko’s paintings. What is it about a couple of rectangles of color stacked one above the other that can hit you in the gut and make your spirit soar?

There are two paintings at Easton’s Academy Art Museum that will do just that. And there are 13 others in the same gallery that will help you understand why.

For once, you don’t have to cross the bridge or head up 95 to see the work of a major American painter. Mark Rothko: Selections from the National Gallery of Art, on view February 4 through April 22, highlights the work of one of the leaders of the Abstract Expressionist movement. On loan from the National Gallery’s extensive Rothko collection (and including seven works never exhibited before), this show is a gem in the form of a micro-retrospective.

The human condition was Rothko’s subject throughout his 50-year career. A Russian-born Jew who at age nine immigrated with his family to America in 1913, Rothko started out painting people.

In “Mother and Child,” painted in the 1930’s, he was already layering color over color. The warm brown surrounding the brushy gray and black image of a child reaching open-armed for its mother brings a homey joy and intimacy to the scene. The child’s spontaneous gesture is matched by this small work’s loose, cartoonish painting style, and its simplicity presages the spare clarity of his later works.

In the printed handout, complete with small photos of each work, the Museum helpfully provides an essay by curator Anke Van Wagenberg detailing Rothko’s development. She includes the words of the painter himself, straightforwardly revealing his aims: “I’m interested only in exploring basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

Beginning with Rothko’s expressionist figurative work and cityscapes of the 1930’s, this exhibit’s fascinating sampling of his work continues with his ventures into myth and surrealism into the 1940’s, and his final move into the familiar luminous rectangles of color that dominated his last 20 years. A show this size must skip the details of his history, but look closely and you’ll see the signs of Rothko’s mature works developing from the start. A conspicuous example is “Untitled (man with green face),” 1934/1935, where the bulky figure of the man stands in front of what might be a Rothko painting from 20 years in the future.

In “Street Scene,” 1936/1937, the claustrophobic vertical thrust of buildings hems pedestrians in as they make their way through the city. Their distorted faces, right-angled figures, and the mix of chalky and lurid colors are still in the expressionist realm, but surrealism is beginning to creep into the hallucinatory perspective of this streetscape. The scene is only relieved by a sideways crescent moon that echoes the tilt of the quizzical face of a pedestrian below. Surreptitiously, it spills luminosity into the scene, a harbinger of the painter’s focus on the inner world of experience.

By the late 1930’s, with surrealism in vogue, Rothko’s quest to explore the human psyche led him to delve into the realm of myth and the unconscious. In these works, it’s clear that he’s struggling to find his way. An untitled oil from 1940-41 portrays a curly-bearded Greek god with super-human muscles and extra limbs. His Janus head looks mutely in two directions. As in many of these works, Rothko’s facility with paint comes to the fore, as line work frolics into fine calligraphy. But there’s a sense of struggle in the painting’s surface, lumpy with the ghosts of previous stages of imagery. It’s obvious that he was fighting to work through his ideas on the canvas.

By the late 1940’s, he was paring down, dropping representational painting in favor of the pure emotion of color. It’s almost a relief to see the figures disappear, as color takes over, and Rothko truly comes into his own.

By 1949, he had found his iconic style, the rectangles of glowing color so familiar to art lovers today. Of the four paintings on view from this period, one of them, “Untitled,” 1952, is disappointing. Its horizontal format feels too much like a run-of-the-mill landscape, and its narrow red and green rectangles bordered with dark blue are too thick and heavy to achieve Rothko’s signature luminosity.

“Untitled,” 1955, makes up for it. This one will lift you up into its creamy white and orange glow. Not quite five feet tall, it’s small for a Rothko, but the scale suits the Academy Art Museum’s gallery. It’s just what a Rothko should be. The more you look, the more you find and the deeper you go. The white isn’t just white; it’s a living veil of active brushwork, weightless at the top but sumptuous and substantial below. Likewise, the orange isn’t just orange; it leans into pink and dances against the slightly more yellow orange of the border. It’s only oil paint and canvas, but it radiates a sensuous, floating feeling, so that you can’t quite tell where the surface is. It reaches out and draws you into a rarified, transcendent realm.

The largest work in the show is the most powerful. “Untitled (brown and gray)” dates from 1969, the year before Rothko committed suicide. Painting in acrylic on paper, he had stripped everything away. Not even the allure of radiant color remained. The near-black rectangle on top meets the gray one below at an ever-so-slightly bowed horizon where the gray just barely darkens. There is nothing but the relationship between the two, and this creates an ineffable sensation of depth. Yet instead of feeling dark in the sense of hopelessness, the darkness is rich with potential. Here is Rothko at his most profound.

The Academy Museum of Art is located at 106 South Street, Easton, MD 21601 and is open daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with extended hours Tuesday through Thursday till 8 p.m. Admission is $3 for non-member, children under 12 admitted free. For more information, call 410-822-ARTS (2787) or visit: www.academyartmuseum.org.

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