Mark Rothko on Painting

Friday, 31 July, 2015, 7pm

 

Some complex thoughts on art from Mark Rothko’s book ‘The Artist’s Reality, Philosophies of Art’, Yale University Press, written 1941 and published for the first time in 2004.

 

Art, Reality and Sensuality

Artists' pigments, like printers' inks, have many uses apart from the creation of art. The advertising artist, the illustrator, the portraitist, the stylist, and the decorator all employ the plastic and pictorial devices of the artist. Yet their chief preoccupation, the purpose and function of their effort, is other than the creation of art. It is the commercial artist's job to enhance the desirability of marketable goods. The illustrator vies with the written word in the description of places or facts and the reporting of events. The portraitist must flatter his patron, while the stylist and decorator adorn his figure, streamline his gadgets, and embellish his property. There may be a resemblance to the outward appearance of art. But the intrinsic relationship is no closer here than that which exists between the composition of birthday greetings, recipes, or advertising copy and the creations of the poet, though the identical phrase and syntax may be used in both.

No doubt, the confusion between art and that which merely resembles it is as eternal as the effort to distinguish between the two. The painter and poet have always suffered its untoward effects. yet, in the case of the painter, there is an element which aggravates this confusion, from which the poet is comparatively free. This element is the ambiguous character of the word art itself, which is legitimately applied to any kind of skill. We have therefore the Art of Love, the Art of War as well as the Art of Cooking. But in common usage it describes, particularly, the skill of manipulating plastic materials to pictorial and decorative ends. Hence, while the reporter is seldom confounded with the poet, the illustrator, the decorator, and innumerable others - named or unnamed above - all are properly alluded to as artists. The housepainter and hat-trimmer, too, whose fee is sufficiently high, share this appellation.

This common participation in the Trinity of Line, Form, and Color has founded a promiscuous fellowship which, while promoting the respect for skill, promotes to a far greater degree the misunderstanding of art. For skill in itself is but a sleight of hand. In a a work of art one does not measure its extent but counts himself happiest when he is unaware of its existence in the contemplation of the result. Among those who decorate our banks and hotels you will find many who can imitate the manner of any master, living or dead, far better than the master could imitate himself. But they have no more knowledge of his soul than they have knowledge of their own. We all know how little skill avails, how ineffective are its artifices in filling the lack of true artistic motivation. His "less is more," is Robert Browning's famous evaluation of this problem in comparing the imperfections of Raphael's art to the impeccability of Del Sarto's. "I should rather say that it will be more difficult to improve the mind of the master who makes such mistakes than to repair the work he has spoilt," Leonardo wrote. Neither Giotto nor Goya exhibited half the skill of Correggio or Sargent, either in the complexity of their undertakings or the apparent virtuosity of execution. The artist must have the particular skill to achieve his particular ends. If he has more, we are fortunate not to know it, for the exhibition of this excess would only mar his art. You may be sure that the artist whose method is muddled betrays less his technical inadequacy than the incoherence of his own intentions.

This brief statement by no means exhausts the discussion of skill. The whole

question of what constitutes skill and what does not, the difference between surface and expressive skill, and the fascinating relationship between method and concept will be fully discussed in another place. These can be better resolved when we have further explained the purpose of the art with which its method is inextricably allied. Our intention here is to show how short is the reach of skill, and to what lengths one can be misled by apprehending art through this common similarity.

To understand either art or commercial art, we must penetrate the mind of their creators. Any parallels or classifications which can be useful in understanding these forms must discard this kinship of material and method and seek instead the motivations and objectives in their creation. The vernacular, too, hints vaguely at this distinction by drawing the jagged line of differentiation between the "fine" and "applied" arts.

From the viewpoint of mind and purpose, no one resembles the artist less than those others who share his devices. The art of the advertising artist can be understood only by the study of the mind of the salesman. The aim of each is to sell his respective product by exaggerating its virtues and suppressing its defects. The illustrator will find his soul mate in the news reporter or the tabloid photographer. The verisimilitude of his descriptions will depend upon what appears real to his employer. The fashionable portrait painter is closest to those courtly flatterers whose hipocrisy is the ladder to material success. While the man who contrived his pictures so they look well above a sofa, as well as the decorator and stylist, shares the intentions of the confectioner, whose function it is to season luxury with the pleasures of the senses.

Objective lmpressionism

The impressionism which is connected, in the vernacular, with art such as that of Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, is really the continuation of the integrity of the light factor in a picture, and from that point of view is no departure from the interests of painting since the end of the myth. These artists, like their predecessors, continued to use light as the chief sensual coordinator - the common denominator which bound all the elements of the picture - and maintained the use of the resultant mood as the emotional source of the picture. Their chief contribution was the discovery of the possibility of achieving these effects without reliance on tone, and they showed the possibilities of reducing the extended spectrum palette into the domain of impressionism.

Now the use of color for its own sensual ends as well as for its structural ends had greatly deteriorated since the time of Giotto. Perspective displaced the use of the organic quality of colors, which had previously, in and of themselves, produced the tactile effect of recession and advancement. Painters who wished to push distance further and further into the canvas, away from the frontal plane, and who were interested in the illustration of the illusion of space, had found perspective a more suitable demonstration of these desires. Also, the development of atmospheric perspective had emphasized the tonal values of color as they appeared at various distances from the frontal plane, and abstracted colour from its sensual effects to the functional ends it served. A painter was not interested in giving the sensation of colorfulness but rather the sensation of the recession of color, that is, in its various intervals of gray as it receded. Also, instead of affecting the emotions sensually by the interaction of colors the artist affected mood through the pervasion of the entire surface by a single color mood in much the same way we described the use of color mood in the modern theater.

For these reasons, the colorfulness of painting since the Renaissance had been greatly reduced. Colors might have been used with a certain amount of brilliance to portray a specific local material, but they always had to participate in the general grayness of tonality. We know, in contrast, that as the last step in painting a canvas some of the old masters would sometimes cover the entire canvas with a glaze of a single color in order to achieve the one color tonality. To achieve a similar effect, the Venetians worked on colored backgrounds wherein the basic color was allowed to function everywhere through the other colors superimposed upon it. And we of course are all familiar with the general brownness and grayness of the Dutch and English and French pictures. Even Delacroix, who had a passion for the sensual qualities of color, never really understood the problem. He succeeded simply in producing more sensual and more dramatic tonality. That is, instead of browns he used red tonalities, which gave his pictures more dramatic moods than those of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. The use of fatty oils and varnishes also gave the pictures a more unified tonality, for the reflection of the shiny surfaces made them all participate in the mysterious depths which these materials created.

Now French impressionism did not alter the objectives of the painters in relation to this tonality, but set out rather to render this tonality, this ultimate grayness, by means of a greatly extended palette. In other words, while this technique made it possible for the artist to actually have a greater number of pure or brighter colors on his canvas, the quality of grayness as the ultimate effect could still be preserved. This approach was sparked by the discovery that the optical apparatus actually synthesized. That is, the fundamental or basic materials received by the eye were really different bits of color, which the eye proceeded to combine into the various tonal relationships characteristic of the laws of color perspective. These researches and laws are well known to everyone by now, and we need not go into their explanation here.

The important thing for us to consider at present is: what relationship to the general sense of reality did these new preoccupations mirror? Why did art preoccupy itself with this particular type of analysis after centuries of being satisfied with the representation of light as it gave form and emotion to particulars? Why this new fascination with how these actually appeared to man's visual intelligence?

Our answers will be found in the examination of all the scientific and philosophical preoccupations of that age. Until this time, man's investigation was chiefly centered upon the study of the objects of sensation, of the things man saw, touched, heard, and smelled in the world we call the objective - external to the senses themselves. But now the analysis extended to the examination of the apparatus of those organs by which man received those sensations. Man here differentiated between his intelligible perception and the methods by which he received sensations and finally perceived them. ln other words, the senses themselves were removed from the body, turned about, and examined.

Up to this point man and his organs were an inviolable whole, but now specialization was viewed as beginning within the organism itself, and man himself was no longer an indivisible unit, but the compound of many interacting separate elements, which in their turn produce a new unity. Psychology was born, but it was a mechanistic psychology and it was reserved for a later time to make further divisions that produced still new notions of reality and new unities which in turn needed to be addressed.

Fifteen hundred years earlier Plato had proclaimed that things were not what they seemed. However, he had never conceived of the physical or mechanistic basis that served as an intermediary between seeming and being. We know today that impressionistic synthesizing is merely one of a great number of intermediaries whose properties or scope we have hardly begun to know. Plato's differentiation was of course moralistic as well as scientific and hence found more pertinence in art. Christianity accepted Plato's differentiation and embodied it in a mystical human myth. The Renaissance, of course, rejected Platonism, along with the Christian notion of reality, and committed the Christian sin of considering appearance as reality.

Here, then, with French impressionism we find a swing back toward Plato, and in fact, many later artistic developments bridge the gap between the world of appearances and that of ideas. Actually, these developments gave a physical embodiment to his notion of pure forms and even constructed new systems, which, through the employment of abstract symbols divorced from particular appearances, referenced the experience of ideal prototypes.

We have noted that in this sense, the impressionism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century began the movement away from the acceptance of particular appearances as the notions of reality. Here Cezanne came on the scene, and in the world of plastic philosophy he played an important part.

We might say that Cezanne was a reaction to Monet. We may say, too, that he played the same part toward the laws of impressionism that those Renaissance artists who discarded the demonstration of the laws of perspective as the objective of art played during those times. Essentially Cezanne was a pragmatist. He saw clearly that with the pursuit of Monet's preoccupations, all visual phenomena would be disintegrated into a series of equally material color blobs; that it would be the dissolution of all reality, for the result would be an ultimate monotony wherein the similar would annihilate all differences; a situation which is not consistent with our conscious awareness. For he knew that man was sensitive to limitations, to differences of weight or sharply differentiated forms, and to a variety of intrinsic properties. He knew that a cornerstone of mental life was the apperception of distinctions based upon reference to similarities and that emphasis of sameness leads to the death of consciousness of contrasts. Thus, to heighten awareness of distinctions would be a tool to further emphasize the reality of our sensible perceptions; that it is to this end we should employ our plastic means rather than use them toward the dissolution of differences.

Since Cezanne's preoccupation was particularly one of giving augmented tangibility to the physical existence of objects, in particular the demonstration of that existence through weight, we find that the process developed a series of other manifestations that point to the developments of art which were to follow. Cezanne was not interested in the appearance of particulars of objects. His painting was a demonstration of our sensation or apperception of the abstraction of the real existence of the weight of objects as units. This was a reaction to the dissolution of the unity of particular shapes found in Monet's impressionism. Hence one might say that his painting was the demonstration of the abstraction of weight differences, for it was only through the picturing of comparative solidities that he could give an embodiment of that kind of form to particulars. As a result, his demonstration reduced his particular forms to abstractions, as it was in this manner that he could best impart the clear picture of structural relief. And so, unwontedly, he indicated the direction in which later art developed: toward a plastic equivalent to Plato's notion of abstract ideas. Since he, too, used color structurally to enhance his apperception of the existence of color, he needed to discover the structural function of color.

Cezanne was not blind to the corollaries which came as a result of his preoccupations. For as they developed, one by one he changed the factors in his demonstration to use these new developments. He began by attempting to give a sense of relief by the method of a sculptor, producing an actual sculptural relief by the use of impasto. He augmented the sense of relief by having these accrued protruding masses turning into the space by the means of color. Then he abandoned this method because he realized that color within itself had a tactile function and hence this sort of actual relief was unnecessary. He discovered that the sensation was most directly affected by the color quality itself. He also realized the nature of what he was demonstrating, and spoke of his employment of shapes as abstractions for the purposes of those demonstrations. In this sense he understood and stated the symbolic function of all of his elements in the pictures, and later we find him abandoning his romanticism - that is, the representation of human emotionality - for tactile, plastic sensuality.

In other words, his was a reaction to the notion of the flux and a reaffirmation of the principle of stability. The corollary task was the restatement of the importance of the stability of the ultimate equilibrium of the whole picture, and of all those devices of distortion and abstraction. It also resulted in a general immobility that he imparted even to his presentation of live organisms.

Yet he always remained an impressionist. For like the others, he was interested in the reaffirmation of reality through the agency of light, which is the conveyer of visual reality to man, the agency by which man knows reality through the world of appearances. Thus, while he abstracted the shapes of the appearances, he still retained their particularities, for he never lost sight of his original and constant objective: the reaffirmation of the visual reality of the world, of the reality of the things that we accept as real in our visual experience. All his use of the abstract factors were for the purpose of the augmentation of the sense of the world of appearances. This is the direct opposite of those who developed his methods for the demonstration of the participation of experience in the generalizations of the world of ideas.

Cezanne also accomplished the structural reconstruction of painting. As we have said, it was his purpose to reaffirm the reality of the world of appearances. This reality wasn't one simply of the individual objects, but had to be applied to those objects' interrelationships as well because the generalization of the validity of appearance meant the extension of that validity to the perception of the solidity of all their interrelationships. He therefore imparted this solidity to every square inch of the picture. This again was a reaction to those who dissolved the concreteness of both space and the objects within it into the uncertainties of romanticism. Painters, in their overemphasis upon mood, became slip-shod in depicting the reality of those elements to which their mood was applied. The portions that were not as important as the central object of their romantic illustrations fell more and more into neglect. Painting had become the extension of mood to perceptible objects when there were no longer any objects to receive these extensions. In that sense, Cezanne's art was a protest in two directions against the dissolution of the world of matter; it argued against the sacrifice of the tactile for romantic emotion, even as it countered the dissolution of tactile appearance, that is, he moved away from the manner in which Monet and others had divided tactile appearance by its division through the representation of the mechanics of vision.

In that sense he was the exact opposite of the painters who came after him. For he was mindful of the world of appearances and spent his life in the reaffirmation of that world's existence. His followers, however, while imbibing and continuing his predilection for structural integrity, abandoned the direct world of appearances and sought to affirm that structural integrity through references to the generalizations of forms.