Mark Rothko in Florence, a city whose art influenced him

I’ll be bold and say it: the retrospective of Mark Rothko at Palazzo Strozzi – and probably any show dedicated to the artist – is not an art historian’s exhibition. We art historians like to analyse and take art from a distance, whereas to appreciate Rothko, I think you have to remove cerebral veils that might block your emotional openness. Or maybe it’s just me – I mean no offense to other art historians.

Like so many blockbuster shows these days, it’s about the viewer’s personal relationship to the art. But unlike say, Jeff Koons (to cite another example of a recent exhibit at Palazzo Strozzi), where “it’s all about you” because you’re mirrored in a bubble dog, there’s something a lot darker in the reflection that more sensitive observers feel when they allow themselves to be engulfed in a Rothko. It’s about introspection, not narcissistic and humoristic mirroring. If Koons is all marketing, Rothko is the anti-Koons. He literally refused to sell his art if it was just going to be a backdrop.

Rothko’s early works in the first room of the gallery – photo: Author

The family of Mark Rothko, née Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, emigrated from Russia to the west coast of the United States in 1913. He attended two years at Yale in the early 1920s, but left to hang out in New York, taking a course at the Art Students League and working occasional jobs. Married twice, in 1932 and 1945, he began exhibiting his art in prestigious galleries, took a break to study philosophy, and eventually represented the USA at the Biennale di Venezia of 1958. He travelled to Europe in 1950 and again in 1959 and 1966 with his family. In Florence, Rothko is struck by Fra Angelico at San Marco, and by the Laurentian Library. He visits Piero della Francesca in Arezzo and Giotto in Assisi. He drank and smoked heavily, suffered from depression, and committed suicide in 1970.

The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi presents Rothko’s works in chronological order. Before developing the colour-field paintings that he would become known for, he began, like most, with paintings that are at least partially representational – he cites Rembrant as a major influence, but if he tried at all to paint like him, he did not succeed, at least not in a traditional manner. But even his early pictorial works did not focus on characters, but on their emotional state within constrained spaces such as the city.

Around 1946 we see his first Multiforms, abstract and colourful paintings, sometimes with amoeba-like forms. He’s starting to get rid of pictorial elements, experimenting with the oil technique, with many layers, with blurred borders and larger scale. I like this Rothko. I think he was happy.

Colour field works in the yellow-red scheme

In the 1950s he began to paint what we think of when we say “it’s a Rothko” and these are called his “Classical” works, which is an odd terminology for something that has very little to do with Classicism. In a stretch, one can say that his division of the canvas into either halves or thirds has something to do with established composition… Here, he explores how colour and light can influence emotions. The works on display here are bright – a room full of yellow, red, orange.

As we move forward, colours give way to cool blues and greens, moving towards browns and blacks. An encounter with Pompeii brings on a red phase. Things get simply depressing when they’re limited only to black and grey – paintings on which Rothko paints a white “frame” for the first time.

“The fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”

Rothko had clear ideas about how his works were to be displayed. He wanted works hung low to the ground, where viewers could get right up to it and be engulfed by its scale. He preferred quiet, meditative spaces and specified that they should be dimly lit; indeed it struck me about halfway through the show that it was unusually dark in the gallery. This careful orchestration of the viewing experience indicates a keen awareness of the impact these works can have on viewers.

A visitor standing close to one of the darker works (photo: Author)

Reaching the end of the exhibition, I ran into a friend who was desperately searching for a dry corner of a worried Kleenex. She had been pretending not to cry in front of all the other journalists, who, like I, were not crying. But of all of us, she’s the one that gets it. Rothko famously declared: “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

Rothko exhibited in the cells of San Marco

Vasari tells us that Fra Angelico often cried when painting, especially his meditations on the Crucifixion. Not coincidentally, Rothko was very moved by Fra Angelico, and in a nice tie-in with the previous exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, there are small colour-field works displayed in the cells at San Marco, a satellite location of the show. Next to the Noli mi Tangere (to be a stickler, that’s by Benozzo Gozzoli) they’ve hung an orange, pink and red painting that perfectly matches Mary Magdalen’s gown. It’s buzzing with emotion, you can almost hear it, and it is indeed the perfect extension of the Renaissance painting.

Rothko exhibited in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library

Rothko also had a eureka moment in the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library by Michelangelo. He remarked that “the room had exactly the feeling that I wanted … it gives the visitor the feeling of being caught in a room with the doors and windows walled-in shut.” It’s a very perceptive reading of the space that does have a lot of tension in its verticality and severity, which is in such complete contrast with the warm reading room just beyond the melting staircase. His untitled work from 1960, black on red, holds a similar vertical tension. For the occasion, two small works on paper are hung in the vestibule, an incredible honour. “I think he would be happy to know that his work is in dialogue with these places,” says his son Christopher Rothko, “… that marked him profoundly and that, in some way, continue to be part of his story.”