American Masters (1985–…): Season 33, Episode 11 - Rothko: Pictures Must Be Miraculous - full transcript
Mark Rothko, a master of abstract expressionism, created 835 paintings during his five-decade career.
♪
Auctioneer: Lot 20 is next.
The Mark Rothko
"Orange, Red, Yellow,"
and $24 million starts.
$24 million, $25 million,
$26 million, $27 million,
$28 million,
$29 million, $30 million,
$31 million, $32 million,
$33 million, $45 million,
$53 million, $56 million...
White: Typically for a
high-profile lot that we sell,
you're looking at
two to three minutes
would be sort of
an average time frame,
and for the Rothko,
the bidding war
lasted for seven minutes,
with over 50 bids made.
Auctioneer: $74 million.
What's that, $75 million?
$75 million, $77-million-5,
and selling to Brett Spitter.
Fair warning,
all done at $77,500,000.
Brett Spitter at $77-million-5.
White: Not only was this sale
the world record for the artist,
at the time, it was
the most expensive postwar
and contemporary artwork
ever sold
in the world.
Kate: I think he would
have been appalled.
The auction prices now
really reflect a culture
in which paintings
are considered an investment
rather than something
you really care about
and want to live with.
He often said,
"A painting lives in the eyes
of a sensitive viewer,"
and I think that
particular audience
was what he cared about.
♪
♪
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Mancusi-Ungaro:
I think Rothko is one of
our great American artists.
♪
Fujimura:
A Rothko is deceptively simple
and yet profound.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro: There's nothing
simple about Rothko's work.
It's actually very complex.
If you think it is simple, you
should try to do it yourself.
♪
Christopher: I think
my father really communicated
the seriousness of painting.
The painting wasn't something
just to look at.
It wasn't something
that you appreciated
because it appealed
simply to the senses.
Kate:
I think he wanted the viewer
to look inside themselves
and see what the painting
brought out in them.
♪
Fujimura:
I've known few people
who have sat in front
of Rothko for an hour,
and it has literally
changed their life.
Mark Rothko's work
opens you up in ways
that you're not expecting.
♪
Bickelhaupt: I used to think
that Rothko paintings
were just these easy squares...
and the longer I look
at the Rothko paintings,
the more I see these worlds,
these kind of locations
that he wants us to go to,
and I like that.
Then it's open, you know?
What is my experience
going to be
is gonna be different than what
your experience is gonna be,
and both of them are right.
♪
Fujimura: It's very unusual that
he created something cohesively.
A century later,
it can expand into a language
that we didn't know
that we needed.
This chaotic time
that we live in,
the angst, the anxiety,
all of that is given
a framework by Mark Rothko.
Today is a great time,
great context to revisit
a Mark Rothko
and... and sit in front of it
for hours and hours.
♪
Molina: Well, I've... I've
played Mark Rothko on stage
a few hundred times
now over the years,
and I don't think
I'll ever play as deep
and as complicated a role again.
I think this is...
This is my King Lear.
Mark: L-Look at the tension
between the blocks of color.
Molina: The first thing
I connected with Mark Rothko
was the fact
that he was an immigrant.
My parents were immigrants
to the U.K.
I think that particular mind-set
of being taken away
from your home
and going to a new country
and all the issues and problems
that you have
to confront with that.
♪
Christopher: My father
was born in Dvinsk,
which was then a part
of the Russian Empire.
Margles: Dvinsk was part of
the Pale of Settlement,
which was this
wide swath of land
where Jews were allowed to live,
and anti-Semitism was rampant.
There was an incredible
military presence in Dvinsk.
His brother Moise writes
about the Cossacks
running through town
on horseback
and whipping the townspeople,
and Mark actually suggests
that he has a scar on his nose
that was caused by such a whip.
Christopher: My father's father
and his two older brothers
were conscripted
into the Tsar's army,
and they decided that they
would rather flee than fight.
It would have been very unlikely
that they would have seen
more than a couple of winters
in the army,
so they decided to emigrate
to the U.S.
Kate: My father
left Dvinsk in 1913.
Christopher: And they
came by steamer to the U.S.
and landed at Ellis Island.
Margles: Between 1880 and 1924,
2.5 million Jews
came to the United States
from Imperial Russia.
Kate: They fairly immediately
got on a train
to Portland, Oregon.
There was a relative,
the Weinsteins,
who had already settled there,
and therefore it seemed
like a likely place
for my grandfather to decide
to try to settle.
Molina: "My mother fixed me up
with one of those
Buster Brown suits.
You don't know what it's like
to be a Jewish kid
dressed in a suit
made in Dvinsk,
not an American idea of a suit.
Traveling across America,
not able to speak
a word of English,
I could never forgive
transplantation to a land
where I never felt at home."
Guenther:
Rothko arrives in this country
as Markus Rothkowitz.
It's an event that shapes
his being his entire life.
Kate:
And within less than a year
of my father's arrival,
my grandfather died,
quite young, of cancer.
Rabin: And Mark had to
raise money for the family
by selling newspapers.
This was something that a lot
of the immigrant kids did
and would come home beaten up
because the other guys didn't
want another corner taken up.
♪
He also got a job
in his uncle's store,
the New York Outfitting Company
in downtown Portland.
Things sometimes got quiet,
and Mark would doodle or draw
on New York Outfitting
wrapping paper.
His uncle happened to come by
one day and say,
"Mark, what are you doing?"
and Mark would show him.
He says, "Uh-uh, you're not
gonna be able to earn
a living that way."
Guenther: In high school,
Markus Rothkowitz
is a bit of a troublemaker,
moody, intellectual,
politically interested.
He's very aware
of workers' rights,
fair salaries, decent housing,
and he becomes known
as a mouthy young man.
Mark Rothko graduated in three
years from Lincoln High School,
and there was an article
in "The Oregonian"
that noted that three young men
had gotten full scholarships
to go to Yale University
from the graduating class
of Lincoln High School.
The scholarships are withdrawn
the second year
because Yale wasn't ready
to have verbal, accomplished,
politically inclined
Jewish students
in the middle of the bastion
of WASP culture.
The second year,
he supports himself
by working in
a laundry downtown,
and he works in a dining hall
with all the swells.
He gets through his second year
and decides that he can't go on,
and instead of coming home,
he goes to New York.
♪
Cooper: In the art scene
in New York in the '20s,
it's unimaginably small.
♪
I think everybody knew
everybody,
and to study modern art
in any sense,
you really went to
the Art Students League.
♪
It's a place where there were
open studios
and modeling sessions,
and artists dropped in
and connected,
got to know everybody
on the scene.
♪
Molina: "I went to New York
to wander around,
bum about, starve a bit.
Then one day,
I wandered into an art class.
All the students were
sketching this nude model.
I thought it was marvelous.
I was intoxicated by it,
and right away I decided
that was the life for me."
Kate:
I think my father's approach
was really a philosophical one
when I look back
at how he made his decision
to become a visual artist.
I think he was really
searching around
to look for what medium he could
use to express the ideas
and the emotions he wanted
to convey to the public.
Christopher: My father
became very friendly
with Milton Avery,
starting in the 1920s,
which was essential for him
both to have a mentor,
as an artist, someone he could
really look up to and learn from
and spend time in their studio
because he'd had
no experience with that.
The Averys actually fed him
a great deal
when he really had barely
2 cents
to scrape together
in those early years
and particularly
during the Depression.
♪
I think that if you look at
my father's figurative work
from that period, you can see
a lot of indebtedness to Avery,
who was painting
figurative paintings,
but highly abstracted,
highly stylized,
not looking to depict
visual reality as we see it,
but to capture a feeling
and emotion of time and place.
There are hundreds of early
figurative works by my father,
both on canvas and on paper.
♪
Cooper: His first paintings,
that we know of are
from those early years,
were not terribly promising.
He doesn't seem to have
a lot of facility
right out of the gate.
He sticks with it
for some reason,
and it's a long career
with wonderful twists and turns
until he... he becomes Rothko,
until he finds himself,
you could say.
♪
Rabin: In the summer of 1933,
Mark and his new wife, Edith,
hitchhiked across the country to
visit with family in Portland.
And where did they stay?
Not with his mother, no.
With his sister? No.
They camped in the West Hills,
somewhere in the West Hills,
overlooking the Willamette
to the east side.
While they were up there,
Mark painted the landscape.
We saw an east side
that had trees,
and he gave these
very sweet watercolor paintings
to members of the family.
Reiter: My family thought he was
a little crazy
sleeping out on the hillside and
hitchhiking across the country.
Rabin: Whenever they came,
I would have a brunch.
We had a deck
outside of the house,
and I'd gather all the family
that I could,
and it was just
a nice warm gathering.
♪
Christopher:
I think my father's family
never quite understood this
whole idea of being an artist
or certainly what
his artwork was about,
and yet he remained
very close to them.
They were central to his life.
♪
Reiter: That's my father, Moise.
This is Albert,
and this is Mark.
I felt very close to him,
even though I didn't see him
very often
because he lived in New York,
but I used to
write letters to him.
♪
My mother used to complain that
he never sent home any money.
But he was a poor
starving artist.
Christopher:
My father's brothers
were far more practical
than he was,
and they went on
to pursue careers
as pharmacists,
which was the family...
The family business
for a few generations,
and they were
sometimes resentful
that the youngest child went off
in pursuing this crazy career
as an artist
when he had a mother to support.
Reiter: Part of the family used
to make fun of his paintings.
Rabin: His eldest sister
honestly said to him
at that time,
"I don't understand
a thing about your art.
Mark, paint me a picture
that I can understand."
So, as a dutiful brother,
he did paint her a picture
that she could understand,
a small picture.
Christopher: It's always
been remarkable to me
that for the first 25
or 30 years of his career,
my father created
so much artwork,
but it was all done nights
and weekends
because he had a day job
as a teacher,
and he was selling
essentially zero paintings.
I think he must have questioned
many times
whether making art
was going to be the answer
to what he was gonna do
with his life.
Kate: We believe
he struggled with depression,
from everything
we can piece together,
in the very early 1940s.
We know he had a period,
really at least a year,
when he did not really paint.
We also know at that time
that his first marriage
was not going well.
She viewed herself as
a jewelry maker, as an artist.
I don't think my father
really considered her an artist,
and I think that was actually
a source
of a fair amount of tension
between the two of them.
She wanted him to help her
with her arts,
and she felt she was the one
who was supporting the family,
and he was set in pursuing
exactly what he was doing.
So I think it was
a tumultuous relationship,
but his level of depression
seems to have gone beyond
just being a reaction
to what was going on around him.
♪
Well, in the late '30s,
my father was working on
a series of paintings
related to the New York subway.
It's a very strange
and lonely scene in many ways,
and, you know,
that may reflect how he felt.
In one way,
New York was treating him well,
but in another way,
it was a place
where he was really struggling
at the time.
♪
Cooper: They are very moving
and disturbing images...
figures almost hiding between
and behind the columns,
very elongated, emaciated.
There's a sense of maybe
being in a catacomb.
Christopher:
And you can see almost
the geometric configurations
that he's looking at and playing
with, that he will be doing
in a purely abstract way
15 years later or so.
♪
Krueger: What we do here
at the National Gallery,
we're caring for
handmade objects
that have ended up here
in Washington, D.C.
This incredibly rare
treasured collection
is ours to learn about,
to study, and to take care of.
♪
The challenge of working
with masterpieces
is that they're irreplaceable.
There's a lot of responsibility
on the conservator
making right decisions,
using the right materials.
The picture I'm working on today
is a late picture of a Rothko,
late 1969.
Picture sustained a few
impact cracks from the reverse,
so the canvas was flexed
and the slightly more brittle
paint on the surface cracked.
The cracks have slightly raised,
and you can begin to see
the white ground
below this dark black paint.
What I am doing is just flowing
the right black color
into these cracks
so that you don't
see them anymore.
The cracks just... I mean,
they haven't physically closed,
but you no longer see
the white of a crack.
Reversibility is a key tenant
of modern conservation,
with the idea being
that everything we do
can be safely undone.
So if you apply
retouching for a loss,
you want that material to be
very soluble 50 years from now
if somebody ever needs
to remove it.
A lot of what we do is,
if you can get a picture
to present well in the gallery
so that your eye keeps moving
across the surface
and doesn't stop,
you've accomplished a lot.
You've probably accomplished
all you need to do.
♪
Pretty much by the mid-'40s,
Rothko evolved a way of painting
with very, very
thin paint layers.
He stretches cotton duck canvas,
and he seals it
with rabbit-skin glue,
but he pigments the glue first,
and then on top
of that colored layer,
then he'll work with very,
very thin layers of oil paint,
very thin layers
of handmade paints,
where he's mixing pigment
in damar resin
or he's mixing pigment in eggs.
If you look at any Rothko
very carefully,
you'll start to see variations
in matte and gloss,
variations in opacity,
and these all had to do
with how he changes media.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
I think the layering
creates an aura about them.
I think they enticed us
visually to enter them.
The oil surface can almost
push you away, the viewer,
whereas these layers that
incorporate different materials
invite you in
because some are shiny
and some are not
and some are moving
and some are not, and it's a...
It's a much more
engaging surface
than something that's just flat.
Krueger: For me, the best thing
about working on Rothko
is having developed
this connection
over many, many years,
things I've worked on,
things I've instructed
fellows and interns on.
He's a very special painter
to me.
♪
Guenther: Rothko changed
his name in 1940
because of an offhand comment
by his dealer,
who observed that she had
too many Jewish artists,
and she couldn't
offer him a show,
and he realized
that he could solve this problem
by shortening his name
to Mark Rothko,
American citizen.
Kate: My father
and an Adolph Gottlieb
began to work
on a series of paintings
which were highly influenced
by Greek myth.
♪
Guenther: Whereas traditional
American painting
wanted to create
the sense of depth,
the space of the real world
on the canvas,
Rothko and Gottlieb
abandoned that,
and they, in very modern,
contemporary voice,
create a flat picture.
♪
In 1943,
there's a major exhibition
in which Adolph Gottlieb
and Mark Rothko participate.
It is the first foray by
the modern painters of New York.
It is a gauntlet thrown down
against the establishment
of American art.
It's reviewed in "The New York
Times" by Edward Jewell,
a conservative art critic,
who pans the exhibition,
who finds in these
fledgling modernists
the immigrant voice,
the non-American voice,
and he's very critical.
Cooper: Rothko and Gottlieb
write a letter
to "The New York Times,"
which has now
gone down in history
because it's really a manifesto
and it's not just a complaint.
Molina: "We salute this honest,
we might say cordial,
reaction to towards
our obscure paintings,
and we appreciate
the gracious opportunity
that is being offered us
to present our views.
We do not intend
to defend our pictures.
They make their own defense."
Cooper: "Times"
publishes the whole thing,
and midway through, they
articulate these five points.
Number one, "To us art is an
adventure into an unknown world,
which can be explored
only by those willing
to take the risks."
Christopher: Number two,
"The world of the imagination
is fancy-free and violently
opposed to common sense."
Mancusi-Ungaro: Three,
"It is our function as artists
to make the spectator see
the world our way, not his way."
Hmm.
Cooper: Number four,
"We are for flat forms
because they destroy illusion
and reveal truth."
Christopher: Number five.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
"There is no such thing..."
Cooper: "as good painting
about nothing."
Christopher: "We assert
that the subject is crucial..."
Cooper: "which is
tragic and timeless."
Mancusi-Ungaro: "Sincerely
yours, Adolph Gottlieb..."
Molina: "and Markus Rothko."
Cooper: It's wonderful.
I think it tells a lot
about that particular time
that it was written.
It introduces language which
will become the common language
of art studios in New York.
Mancusi-Ungaro: They were
breaking away from a tradition,
and in so doing, you almost
have to destroy the tradition
you're breaking away from.
♪
It makes perfect sense to me
that they would feel
the way they did
because they were striking out,
doing something new
and different.
They knew it, too.
Guenther: In the mid-
to late 1940s in New York,
there was a new
artistic movement emerging
that was uniquely American,
and it came to be known
as abstract expressionism.
A group of artists that included
Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner,
Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still,
along with Rothko and Gottlieb,
and they were experimenting
with the voice
and the look of art.
Cooper: Before this time,
American painters,
they traveled to Europe,
then they went home, and nobody
really heard of them again.
Right after World War Il,
all of that changes.
Mancusi-Ungaro: I think
the abstract expressionists
were interested in big ideas,
big concepts
based in human energy
and human response.
They launched into
the abstraction.
You're standing in front
of a color
or standing in front
of an abstract form
and standing in front
of large paintings,
I mean, very large paintings.
I mean, it was just such
a huge achievement
or a challenge, excitement
to paint something that large.
Guenther: And this is
the great moment for Rothko
in which the physical act
of painting
becomes the picture
the viewer experiences,
floating color, wiping it,
re-layering it
to discover the elegance
of reflected light and color.
♪
Cooper: These painters
are the talk of the world,
and, in some sense,
the center of the art world
shifts from Europe,
from Paris in particular,
to the U.S. and to New York.
It's a huge moment that we're...
We're still dealing with.
♪
Christopher: In the mid-1940s,
my father moves into his
first purely abstracted style,
which has come to be known
as the Multiforms.
♪
Kate: I believe my father
in some way began to feel
that the human figure
interfered with his ability
to directly connect
with his viewer.
♪
Molina: "It was with
the utmost reluctance
that I found the figure
could not serve my purposes,
but a time came when none of us
could use the figure
without mutilating it."
Mancusi-Ungaro:
There were a lot of ideas
that he was playing out
with the Multiforms,
and I feel a certain exuberance,
in a refined way.
I mean, I don't think he was
an exuberant person,
but I-I feel a sense
of excitement in them,
that he... he was getting
into something
that was beginning to work.
♪
Fujimura: There's a technical
term called Nihonga,
which is Japanese-style
painting.
Feel the paintings done
on paper, stretched over canvas,
starts with 80 to 100 layers
of very thin mineral pigments,
just to get it started,
and, yes, I am directly quoting
Rothko when I'm layering.
I think he would have loved
the material of Nihonga.
It is slow art and slow work,
but I think part of the layering
is to capture that sense of time
in the layers.
♪
Mark Rothko... he not only
painted in layers,
but he thought in layers.
It's very clear
from his writings.
He was able to integrate
and even construct a way
the color fields work,
and these layers work
in very subtle ways
that allow for a new world
to open up.
Just magical to me.
That doesn't make sense,
but that's what you experience.
Mark Rothko painted the abyss,
and he's inviting us
to stand on that abyss.
Now, you can say that is
a despair-filled experience,
but I think it's also
an invitation to hope.
I don't mean this sentimental
feeling of hope,
but I mean that it makes me want
to go into my studio and paint,
and that is my act of hope.
♪
Christopher:
My father met my mother
shortly after
his first marriage ended.
♪
Kate: Well, this photo, it's
actually one of the few pictures
I have as a baby with my father,
and there he certainly looks
like a pretty doting father.
Maybe even at the age of 47, 48,
he enjoyed having one of his own
instead of
just teaching children.
I would consider my father
a very concerned father,
certainly a very loving
and involved father.
In some ways, he is my vision
of the classical father,
who was gone 9:00 to 6:00
and, you know,
came home for dinner
and spent a little time
with me in the evening.
Some of my fondest memories
are actually Sunday mornings
with him.
♪
Christopher:
My primary memories of them
are sitting in bed,
reading the paper,
always smoking, always smoking,
and their sheets had multiple,
multiple cigarette burns
and holes in them.
It's just... It's, like, that's
literally burned into my memory.
♪
Krueger: In 1949,
Rothko develops the style
that will make him one of
the most recognized artists
of the 20th century.
♪
Christopher: He finds
a format where he can make full
and direct expression
of the ideas
he's wanted to express
for so long.
Guenther: For me,
the excitement in '49 to '50
are the way
he celebrates the edge.
♪
Color blocks come together,
and they begin to sit
in relationship to each other.
It is that gap between in which
the magic begins to develop.
Fujimura: There's a turning
point in your life
that you can just mark and say,
"This is when I found my voice,"
voice that is a destination
of everything
that you've done in the past,
and that is a fertile place
for an artist.
♪
He was always
in self-doubt mode,
always struggled
with his own internal voice.
So when Rothko found his style,
he settled in that place
of belonging.
Guenther: It represented
the penultimate expression
of that thing that Rothko had
looked for his entire life.
He found a place to live
and celebrate
and a vehicle for his anguish.
♪
Christopher: My father
and Pollock and de Kooning
and Motherwell quickly become
household names
through articles in places like
Life Magazine.
Suddenly, these were
the wunderkinds at age 50
of the art world.
Guenther: By the '50s,
when Rothko hits his stride,
he starts to sell.
Betty Parsons Gallery
represents him,
and she does a series
of five shows,
each of them
more and more successful.
Mark: I was walking up
to my house last week,
and a couple was passing.
The lady looks inside my window
and says,
"Ooh, I wonder who owns
all those Rothkos."
Just like that,
I've become a noun... a Rothko.
Ken: A commodity.
Mark: An overmantel.
Ken: A what?
Mark: The overmantels,
you know,
those paintings doomed
to become mere decoration
over the fireplace
in the fancy-schmancy penthouse.
Oh, they say to you,
"I need something to work
with the sofa."
You understand?
"Something bright and cheery
for the breakfast nook,
which is orange.
You got something in orange
or burnt umber or seafoam green?
Here's a paint chip
from the Sherwin-Williams.
Oh, and can you chop it down
to fit the sideboard?"
Logan: In 1958,
the Seagram's Corporation
finished constructing
an amazing modernist building
on Park Avenue,
and within this
modernist masterpiece,
there's going to be
a beating heart
and it's gonna be a restaurant
called The Four Seasons.
And architect Philip Johnson
went to Mark Rothko and said,
"Why don't you create
a series of murals
that could go
in our dining room?"
The commission was $35,000,
and in 1958,
that was a huge amount of money,
reputed to be the most an artist
had ever been paid in America
for a series of works.
Mark: My first murals.
Imagine a frieze
all around the room,
a continuous narrative filling
the walls one to another,
each a new chapter,
the story unfolding.
You look, and they are there,
inescapable and inexorable.
Logan:
I mean, of all the patrons
who could have
approached Mark Rothko,
Philip Johnson was unique
because he was a provocative
voice in American design
and American art,
and Rothko admired him greatly.
So for him, it was the perfect
combination of voices
creating modern art.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro:
The Seagram paintings,
they're an artist experimenting
with much less color.
♪
This is an enormous challenge
for an artist to take on,
an artist that's known
primarily for color.
He's doing something
very different,
and I think they must have
been very hard for him.
Christopher:
There is some question
about what he was told,
what he understood
about what the nature of that
restaurant was going to be.
Kate: His story was that
he would be painting
for an employees' dining room
and, as an old Socialist,
that made him feel,
you know,
reasonably comfortable,
but I think he may
have known more than that.
In the fall of 1959,
they were invited to dinner
at the restaurant,
which since then
had been completed,
but I remember
their coming home.
My father was so upset
by his visit to the restaurant
that he came in yelling,
you know,
that he was absolutely
going to withdraw from this,
and I'm sure my mother
was trying to calm him down.
Mark: Philip?
This is Rothko.
Listen, I went to
the restaurant last night,
and let me tell you, anyone
who eats that kind of food
for that kind of money
in that kind of joint
will never look
at a painting of mine.
Now, I-I-I'm sending
the money back,
and I'm keeping the pictures.
Ye... No offense.
Yeah, well, this is
the way it goes.
Good luck to you, buddy.
Logan: I think there must have
been a liberation in that call,
in realizing it was
the truest version of himself.
♪
Christopher: My father
was nothing if not principled,
and ultimately he cared more
about the well-being
of his artwork
and the expressive message
that he was trying to bring
than the prestige of having
the Seagram commission
and even the $35,000,
which he sorely needed.
Guenther: And so those murals,
which he had labored on
for months
and started again and rebuilt
just went into storage.
They effectively were hidden.
I think the Seagram
mural process
helped define Rothko
as an individual.
It comes back
to his questioning,
his politics,
and his reality as an artist,
the artist as underdog,
as thorn in the side of society,
as observer.
♪
Christopher: In 1964,
my father was commissioned
by the de Menil family
of Houston
to create what was then
going to be a Catholic chapel
on the University of St. Thomas
campus in Houston.
I think my father felt
that John and Dominique
really understood
his seriousness as an artist
and the... the deeper meaning
or the deeper content
behind his paintings.
♪
Molina: "The magnitude
on every level of experience
and meaning of the task
in which you have involved me
exceeds all my preconceptions,
and it is teaching me
to extend myself
beyond what I thought
was possible for me.
For this, I thank you."
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro: It must have
been a huge compliment to him.
Not only, in this case,
was he given a space
as he was at the Seagram's,
here he had an opportunity
for the space
and the paintings
to work together,
to take the works of art
to another dimension.
Kate:
In order to create this space,
he found a carriage house
on 69th Street in New York.
It allowed him to re-create
three walls of the chapel.
I frequently saw him sitting and
agonizing about the paintings,
and I mean down to the inch,
down to every layering of paint,
the exact heights
of the different panels.
Christopher: I visited
my father in the studio
many times as a child,
and although I never
saw him paint,
because he really did not like
people to watch him paint...
It was really a
solitary journey for him...
He set up long rolls of paper
for me to paint on
and was very encouraging,
and I was just thrilled
to be in that space
and spending time with him.
I remember his warmth
and his enthusiasm
about me being there with him.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro:
The Rothko Chapel
is very much dark paintings.
An urban legend is that
he painted these paintings
'cause he was so depressed.
They were a sign,
an omen of his upcoming death.
♪
I don't think it was that
at all.
I look at it that it was
a natural progression
of where he was going.
He had done so much with color.
He was a master of color and its
ability to affect the viewer.
His next step was to take
the challenge to eliminate it.
Could he still make paintings?
Could he still make works of art
that had that effect?
♪
Fujimura:
To enter into Rothko Chapel
is to enter
into a person's soul.
It's kind of a Zen experience.
♪
To be surrounded
by these works...
and feel your way
into a painting
rather than seeing them,
you can directly go
to the emotions, the feeling,
and that's a contribution
that I think very few artists
have ever reached.
♪
Christopher:
The Rothko Chapel remains,
I think, a very difficult space
for me.
It's one that I don't walk into
without thinking that I'm going
to spend some time there.
The chapel doesn't just invite.
It really demands the viewer
to spend time
and think about
the big questions.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
I like being in the chapel
because I like the sense
of being with self,
and it's really
a remarkable sensation
to go in the chapel
that's quiet and cool
and to sit and to just look
at these paintings
and to see the daylight
moving through it.
They're not individual
paintings.
The work of art
is the entire experience.
It's the space.
It's the light.
It's the paintings.
♪
It's a wonderful experience.
I encourage everyone to do it.
♪
Guenther: Rothko finishes
the chapel murals in 1967,
and they go into storage.
The chapel won't open
until 1971.
It was a moment at which
he had completed
the most important work
of his life, in his mind,
and then in April 1968,
he suffers a dissecting
aortic aneurysm.
It is one of the most serious
things that can happen to you,
short of a heart attack
or stroke.
And for the next year
and a half, he struggles.
His doctor doesn't want him
to work on canvas.
Physically, he can't lift
his arms over 40 degrees.
Christopher:
It's actually a small miracle
that he... he survived this
because it was a significant...
It was a large rupture.
Kate:
Only mode of treatment
was to lower the blood pressure
fairly extremely,
and I think, you know,
that not only exhausted him,
but, you know,
may have contributed in itself
to his depression, as well.
♪
After that time,
he really was limited
in what he could do
with his paintings.
However, it's interesting
because that was perhaps his...
One of his most prolific
six to eight months
of his entire career.
Christopher: He starts
what have become known
as the Black on Gray canvases,
as well as a series of ambitious
large-scale works on paper.
Kate:
And then, surprisingly,
a group of large papers
in pastels,
which is perhaps
the most amazing,
a real departure also from
what he had ever done.
I believe now, looking back,
that he was struggling
with an underlying
depressive illness.
Certainly there were
family problems.
He had separated from my mother,
which was difficult.
He was living in the studio,
which must have been
a difficult setting,
I think a depressing setting
in a lot of ways.
On February 25, 1970,
some time in the early hours
of the morning,
as far as we know,
my father took his own life,
um...
and he was found
the next morning by a young man
who had been assisting him in
the studio during that period,
and, um...
only subsequently did my mother
come to the studio and see him.
I was surprised,
but not as devastated
as when my mother told me
how it had happened.
My first reaction
was that he had died
of something
related to his illness.
Christopher: My father
had worked for four years
exclusively
on the chapel commission.
He did not live to see it.
He died just as construction
was beginning.
So all plans had been completed,
but he never was able
to see the space himself.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
But he did have the experience
of the mural in his studio,
so he certainly had
a sense of it,
and he was very proud of it.
He had his official
portrait taken,
obviously satisfied with them.
♪
♪
♪
Gale: People definitely
seek out the Rothko room
here at Tate Modern.
I think we can confidently say
that it's seen by millions
of people every year.
♪
I think one would like to
believe that there is a sense
of the longevity of the artist
through this room.
It did become a space
which is in tune
with Rothko's own wishes
about it.
It is a place to decompress
and to think about
bigger issues in life.
♪
Molina: People are still
obsessing about his work,
and his work
is still being analyzed
and... and re-evaluated.
I think he would have been
very happy with that.
I mean, I think the fact
that people
are still engaged in a dialogue,
in a relationship with his work
probably the best thing
any artist could wish for.
♪
Fujimura: Part of what he wanted
was future generations
to find his work so inspiring
and challenging.
♪
And that impossibility
of Mark Rothko
is a puzzle
that I want to be part of,
to open up, not to solve,
but to open up to the next
generation and beyond.
♪
Molina: "The most important tool
the artist fashions
through constant practice
is the faith in his ability
to produce miracles
when they are needed.
Pictures must be miraculous."
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
Auctioneer: Lot 20 is next.
The Mark Rothko
"Orange, Red, Yellow,"
and $24 million starts.
$24 million, $25 million,
$26 million, $27 million,
$28 million,
$29 million, $30 million,
$31 million, $32 million,
$33 million, $45 million,
$53 million, $56 million...
White: Typically for a
high-profile lot that we sell,
you're looking at
two to three minutes
would be sort of
an average time frame,
and for the Rothko,
the bidding war
lasted for seven minutes,
with over 50 bids made.
Auctioneer: $74 million.
What's that, $75 million?
$75 million, $77-million-5,
and selling to Brett Spitter.
Fair warning,
all done at $77,500,000.
Brett Spitter at $77-million-5.
White: Not only was this sale
the world record for the artist,
at the time, it was
the most expensive postwar
and contemporary artwork
ever sold
in the world.
Kate: I think he would
have been appalled.
The auction prices now
really reflect a culture
in which paintings
are considered an investment
rather than something
you really care about
and want to live with.
He often said,
"A painting lives in the eyes
of a sensitive viewer,"
and I think that
particular audience
was what he cared about.
♪
♪
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro:
I think Rothko is one of
our great American artists.
♪
Fujimura:
A Rothko is deceptively simple
and yet profound.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro: There's nothing
simple about Rothko's work.
It's actually very complex.
If you think it is simple, you
should try to do it yourself.
♪
Christopher: I think
my father really communicated
the seriousness of painting.
The painting wasn't something
just to look at.
It wasn't something
that you appreciated
because it appealed
simply to the senses.
Kate:
I think he wanted the viewer
to look inside themselves
and see what the painting
brought out in them.
♪
Fujimura:
I've known few people
who have sat in front
of Rothko for an hour,
and it has literally
changed their life.
Mark Rothko's work
opens you up in ways
that you're not expecting.
♪
Bickelhaupt: I used to think
that Rothko paintings
were just these easy squares...
and the longer I look
at the Rothko paintings,
the more I see these worlds,
these kind of locations
that he wants us to go to,
and I like that.
Then it's open, you know?
What is my experience
going to be
is gonna be different than what
your experience is gonna be,
and both of them are right.
♪
Fujimura: It's very unusual that
he created something cohesively.
A century later,
it can expand into a language
that we didn't know
that we needed.
This chaotic time
that we live in,
the angst, the anxiety,
all of that is given
a framework by Mark Rothko.
Today is a great time,
great context to revisit
a Mark Rothko
and... and sit in front of it
for hours and hours.
♪
Molina: Well, I've... I've
played Mark Rothko on stage
a few hundred times
now over the years,
and I don't think
I'll ever play as deep
and as complicated a role again.
I think this is...
This is my King Lear.
Mark: L-Look at the tension
between the blocks of color.
Molina: The first thing
I connected with Mark Rothko
was the fact
that he was an immigrant.
My parents were immigrants
to the U.K.
I think that particular mind-set
of being taken away
from your home
and going to a new country
and all the issues and problems
that you have
to confront with that.
♪
Christopher: My father
was born in Dvinsk,
which was then a part
of the Russian Empire.
Margles: Dvinsk was part of
the Pale of Settlement,
which was this
wide swath of land
where Jews were allowed to live,
and anti-Semitism was rampant.
There was an incredible
military presence in Dvinsk.
His brother Moise writes
about the Cossacks
running through town
on horseback
and whipping the townspeople,
and Mark actually suggests
that he has a scar on his nose
that was caused by such a whip.
Christopher: My father's father
and his two older brothers
were conscripted
into the Tsar's army,
and they decided that they
would rather flee than fight.
It would have been very unlikely
that they would have seen
more than a couple of winters
in the army,
so they decided to emigrate
to the U.S.
Kate: My father
left Dvinsk in 1913.
Christopher: And they
came by steamer to the U.S.
and landed at Ellis Island.
Margles: Between 1880 and 1924,
2.5 million Jews
came to the United States
from Imperial Russia.
Kate: They fairly immediately
got on a train
to Portland, Oregon.
There was a relative,
the Weinsteins,
who had already settled there,
and therefore it seemed
like a likely place
for my grandfather to decide
to try to settle.
Molina: "My mother fixed me up
with one of those
Buster Brown suits.
You don't know what it's like
to be a Jewish kid
dressed in a suit
made in Dvinsk,
not an American idea of a suit.
Traveling across America,
not able to speak
a word of English,
I could never forgive
transplantation to a land
where I never felt at home."
Guenther:
Rothko arrives in this country
as Markus Rothkowitz.
It's an event that shapes
his being his entire life.
Kate:
And within less than a year
of my father's arrival,
my grandfather died,
quite young, of cancer.
Rabin: And Mark had to
raise money for the family
by selling newspapers.
This was something that a lot
of the immigrant kids did
and would come home beaten up
because the other guys didn't
want another corner taken up.
♪
He also got a job
in his uncle's store,
the New York Outfitting Company
in downtown Portland.
Things sometimes got quiet,
and Mark would doodle or draw
on New York Outfitting
wrapping paper.
His uncle happened to come by
one day and say,
"Mark, what are you doing?"
and Mark would show him.
He says, "Uh-uh, you're not
gonna be able to earn
a living that way."
Guenther: In high school,
Markus Rothkowitz
is a bit of a troublemaker,
moody, intellectual,
politically interested.
He's very aware
of workers' rights,
fair salaries, decent housing,
and he becomes known
as a mouthy young man.
Mark Rothko graduated in three
years from Lincoln High School,
and there was an article
in "The Oregonian"
that noted that three young men
had gotten full scholarships
to go to Yale University
from the graduating class
of Lincoln High School.
The scholarships are withdrawn
the second year
because Yale wasn't ready
to have verbal, accomplished,
politically inclined
Jewish students
in the middle of the bastion
of WASP culture.
The second year,
he supports himself
by working in
a laundry downtown,
and he works in a dining hall
with all the swells.
He gets through his second year
and decides that he can't go on,
and instead of coming home,
he goes to New York.
♪
Cooper: In the art scene
in New York in the '20s,
it's unimaginably small.
♪
I think everybody knew
everybody,
and to study modern art
in any sense,
you really went to
the Art Students League.
♪
It's a place where there were
open studios
and modeling sessions,
and artists dropped in
and connected,
got to know everybody
on the scene.
♪
Molina: "I went to New York
to wander around,
bum about, starve a bit.
Then one day,
I wandered into an art class.
All the students were
sketching this nude model.
I thought it was marvelous.
I was intoxicated by it,
and right away I decided
that was the life for me."
Kate:
I think my father's approach
was really a philosophical one
when I look back
at how he made his decision
to become a visual artist.
I think he was really
searching around
to look for what medium he could
use to express the ideas
and the emotions he wanted
to convey to the public.
Christopher: My father
became very friendly
with Milton Avery,
starting in the 1920s,
which was essential for him
both to have a mentor,
as an artist, someone he could
really look up to and learn from
and spend time in their studio
because he'd had
no experience with that.
The Averys actually fed him
a great deal
when he really had barely
2 cents
to scrape together
in those early years
and particularly
during the Depression.
♪
I think that if you look at
my father's figurative work
from that period, you can see
a lot of indebtedness to Avery,
who was painting
figurative paintings,
but highly abstracted,
highly stylized,
not looking to depict
visual reality as we see it,
but to capture a feeling
and emotion of time and place.
There are hundreds of early
figurative works by my father,
both on canvas and on paper.
♪
Cooper: His first paintings,
that we know of are
from those early years,
were not terribly promising.
He doesn't seem to have
a lot of facility
right out of the gate.
He sticks with it
for some reason,
and it's a long career
with wonderful twists and turns
until he... he becomes Rothko,
until he finds himself,
you could say.
♪
Rabin: In the summer of 1933,
Mark and his new wife, Edith,
hitchhiked across the country to
visit with family in Portland.
And where did they stay?
Not with his mother, no.
With his sister? No.
They camped in the West Hills,
somewhere in the West Hills,
overlooking the Willamette
to the east side.
While they were up there,
Mark painted the landscape.
We saw an east side
that had trees,
and he gave these
very sweet watercolor paintings
to members of the family.
Reiter: My family thought he was
a little crazy
sleeping out on the hillside and
hitchhiking across the country.
Rabin: Whenever they came,
I would have a brunch.
We had a deck
outside of the house,
and I'd gather all the family
that I could,
and it was just
a nice warm gathering.
♪
Christopher:
I think my father's family
never quite understood this
whole idea of being an artist
or certainly what
his artwork was about,
and yet he remained
very close to them.
They were central to his life.
♪
Reiter: That's my father, Moise.
This is Albert,
and this is Mark.
I felt very close to him,
even though I didn't see him
very often
because he lived in New York,
but I used to
write letters to him.
♪
My mother used to complain that
he never sent home any money.
But he was a poor
starving artist.
Christopher:
My father's brothers
were far more practical
than he was,
and they went on
to pursue careers
as pharmacists,
which was the family...
The family business
for a few generations,
and they were
sometimes resentful
that the youngest child went off
in pursuing this crazy career
as an artist
when he had a mother to support.
Reiter: Part of the family used
to make fun of his paintings.
Rabin: His eldest sister
honestly said to him
at that time,
"I don't understand
a thing about your art.
Mark, paint me a picture
that I can understand."
So, as a dutiful brother,
he did paint her a picture
that she could understand,
a small picture.
Christopher: It's always
been remarkable to me
that for the first 25
or 30 years of his career,
my father created
so much artwork,
but it was all done nights
and weekends
because he had a day job
as a teacher,
and he was selling
essentially zero paintings.
I think he must have questioned
many times
whether making art
was going to be the answer
to what he was gonna do
with his life.
Kate: We believe
he struggled with depression,
from everything
we can piece together,
in the very early 1940s.
We know he had a period,
really at least a year,
when he did not really paint.
We also know at that time
that his first marriage
was not going well.
She viewed herself as
a jewelry maker, as an artist.
I don't think my father
really considered her an artist,
and I think that was actually
a source
of a fair amount of tension
between the two of them.
She wanted him to help her
with her arts,
and she felt she was the one
who was supporting the family,
and he was set in pursuing
exactly what he was doing.
So I think it was
a tumultuous relationship,
but his level of depression
seems to have gone beyond
just being a reaction
to what was going on around him.
♪
Well, in the late '30s,
my father was working on
a series of paintings
related to the New York subway.
It's a very strange
and lonely scene in many ways,
and, you know,
that may reflect how he felt.
In one way,
New York was treating him well,
but in another way,
it was a place
where he was really struggling
at the time.
♪
Cooper: They are very moving
and disturbing images...
figures almost hiding between
and behind the columns,
very elongated, emaciated.
There's a sense of maybe
being in a catacomb.
Christopher:
And you can see almost
the geometric configurations
that he's looking at and playing
with, that he will be doing
in a purely abstract way
15 years later or so.
♪
Krueger: What we do here
at the National Gallery,
we're caring for
handmade objects
that have ended up here
in Washington, D.C.
This incredibly rare
treasured collection
is ours to learn about,
to study, and to take care of.
♪
The challenge of working
with masterpieces
is that they're irreplaceable.
There's a lot of responsibility
on the conservator
making right decisions,
using the right materials.
The picture I'm working on today
is a late picture of a Rothko,
late 1969.
Picture sustained a few
impact cracks from the reverse,
so the canvas was flexed
and the slightly more brittle
paint on the surface cracked.
The cracks have slightly raised,
and you can begin to see
the white ground
below this dark black paint.
What I am doing is just flowing
the right black color
into these cracks
so that you don't
see them anymore.
The cracks just... I mean,
they haven't physically closed,
but you no longer see
the white of a crack.
Reversibility is a key tenant
of modern conservation,
with the idea being
that everything we do
can be safely undone.
So if you apply
retouching for a loss,
you want that material to be
very soluble 50 years from now
if somebody ever needs
to remove it.
A lot of what we do is,
if you can get a picture
to present well in the gallery
so that your eye keeps moving
across the surface
and doesn't stop,
you've accomplished a lot.
You've probably accomplished
all you need to do.
♪
Pretty much by the mid-'40s,
Rothko evolved a way of painting
with very, very
thin paint layers.
He stretches cotton duck canvas,
and he seals it
with rabbit-skin glue,
but he pigments the glue first,
and then on top
of that colored layer,
then he'll work with very,
very thin layers of oil paint,
very thin layers
of handmade paints,
where he's mixing pigment
in damar resin
or he's mixing pigment in eggs.
If you look at any Rothko
very carefully,
you'll start to see variations
in matte and gloss,
variations in opacity,
and these all had to do
with how he changes media.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
I think the layering
creates an aura about them.
I think they enticed us
visually to enter them.
The oil surface can almost
push you away, the viewer,
whereas these layers that
incorporate different materials
invite you in
because some are shiny
and some are not
and some are moving
and some are not, and it's a...
It's a much more
engaging surface
than something that's just flat.
Krueger: For me, the best thing
about working on Rothko
is having developed
this connection
over many, many years,
things I've worked on,
things I've instructed
fellows and interns on.
He's a very special painter
to me.
♪
Guenther: Rothko changed
his name in 1940
because of an offhand comment
by his dealer,
who observed that she had
too many Jewish artists,
and she couldn't
offer him a show,
and he realized
that he could solve this problem
by shortening his name
to Mark Rothko,
American citizen.
Kate: My father
and an Adolph Gottlieb
began to work
on a series of paintings
which were highly influenced
by Greek myth.
♪
Guenther: Whereas traditional
American painting
wanted to create
the sense of depth,
the space of the real world
on the canvas,
Rothko and Gottlieb
abandoned that,
and they, in very modern,
contemporary voice,
create a flat picture.
♪
In 1943,
there's a major exhibition
in which Adolph Gottlieb
and Mark Rothko participate.
It is the first foray by
the modern painters of New York.
It is a gauntlet thrown down
against the establishment
of American art.
It's reviewed in "The New York
Times" by Edward Jewell,
a conservative art critic,
who pans the exhibition,
who finds in these
fledgling modernists
the immigrant voice,
the non-American voice,
and he's very critical.
Cooper: Rothko and Gottlieb
write a letter
to "The New York Times,"
which has now
gone down in history
because it's really a manifesto
and it's not just a complaint.
Molina: "We salute this honest,
we might say cordial,
reaction to towards
our obscure paintings,
and we appreciate
the gracious opportunity
that is being offered us
to present our views.
We do not intend
to defend our pictures.
They make their own defense."
Cooper: "Times"
publishes the whole thing,
and midway through, they
articulate these five points.
Number one, "To us art is an
adventure into an unknown world,
which can be explored
only by those willing
to take the risks."
Christopher: Number two,
"The world of the imagination
is fancy-free and violently
opposed to common sense."
Mancusi-Ungaro: Three,
"It is our function as artists
to make the spectator see
the world our way, not his way."
Hmm.
Cooper: Number four,
"We are for flat forms
because they destroy illusion
and reveal truth."
Christopher: Number five.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
"There is no such thing..."
Cooper: "as good painting
about nothing."
Christopher: "We assert
that the subject is crucial..."
Cooper: "which is
tragic and timeless."
Mancusi-Ungaro: "Sincerely
yours, Adolph Gottlieb..."
Molina: "and Markus Rothko."
Cooper: It's wonderful.
I think it tells a lot
about that particular time
that it was written.
It introduces language which
will become the common language
of art studios in New York.
Mancusi-Ungaro: They were
breaking away from a tradition,
and in so doing, you almost
have to destroy the tradition
you're breaking away from.
♪
It makes perfect sense to me
that they would feel
the way they did
because they were striking out,
doing something new
and different.
They knew it, too.
Guenther: In the mid-
to late 1940s in New York,
there was a new
artistic movement emerging
that was uniquely American,
and it came to be known
as abstract expressionism.
A group of artists that included
Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner,
Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still,
along with Rothko and Gottlieb,
and they were experimenting
with the voice
and the look of art.
Cooper: Before this time,
American painters,
they traveled to Europe,
then they went home, and nobody
really heard of them again.
Right after World War Il,
all of that changes.
Mancusi-Ungaro: I think
the abstract expressionists
were interested in big ideas,
big concepts
based in human energy
and human response.
They launched into
the abstraction.
You're standing in front
of a color
or standing in front
of an abstract form
and standing in front
of large paintings,
I mean, very large paintings.
I mean, it was just such
a huge achievement
or a challenge, excitement
to paint something that large.
Guenther: And this is
the great moment for Rothko
in which the physical act
of painting
becomes the picture
the viewer experiences,
floating color, wiping it,
re-layering it
to discover the elegance
of reflected light and color.
♪
Cooper: These painters
are the talk of the world,
and, in some sense,
the center of the art world
shifts from Europe,
from Paris in particular,
to the U.S. and to New York.
It's a huge moment that we're...
We're still dealing with.
♪
Christopher: In the mid-1940s,
my father moves into his
first purely abstracted style,
which has come to be known
as the Multiforms.
♪
Kate: I believe my father
in some way began to feel
that the human figure
interfered with his ability
to directly connect
with his viewer.
♪
Molina: "It was with
the utmost reluctance
that I found the figure
could not serve my purposes,
but a time came when none of us
could use the figure
without mutilating it."
Mancusi-Ungaro:
There were a lot of ideas
that he was playing out
with the Multiforms,
and I feel a certain exuberance,
in a refined way.
I mean, I don't think he was
an exuberant person,
but I-I feel a sense
of excitement in them,
that he... he was getting
into something
that was beginning to work.
♪
Fujimura: There's a technical
term called Nihonga,
which is Japanese-style
painting.
Feel the paintings done
on paper, stretched over canvas,
starts with 80 to 100 layers
of very thin mineral pigments,
just to get it started,
and, yes, I am directly quoting
Rothko when I'm layering.
I think he would have loved
the material of Nihonga.
It is slow art and slow work,
but I think part of the layering
is to capture that sense of time
in the layers.
♪
Mark Rothko... he not only
painted in layers,
but he thought in layers.
It's very clear
from his writings.
He was able to integrate
and even construct a way
the color fields work,
and these layers work
in very subtle ways
that allow for a new world
to open up.
Just magical to me.
That doesn't make sense,
but that's what you experience.
Mark Rothko painted the abyss,
and he's inviting us
to stand on that abyss.
Now, you can say that is
a despair-filled experience,
but I think it's also
an invitation to hope.
I don't mean this sentimental
feeling of hope,
but I mean that it makes me want
to go into my studio and paint,
and that is my act of hope.
♪
Christopher:
My father met my mother
shortly after
his first marriage ended.
♪
Kate: Well, this photo, it's
actually one of the few pictures
I have as a baby with my father,
and there he certainly looks
like a pretty doting father.
Maybe even at the age of 47, 48,
he enjoyed having one of his own
instead of
just teaching children.
I would consider my father
a very concerned father,
certainly a very loving
and involved father.
In some ways, he is my vision
of the classical father,
who was gone 9:00 to 6:00
and, you know,
came home for dinner
and spent a little time
with me in the evening.
Some of my fondest memories
are actually Sunday mornings
with him.
♪
Christopher:
My primary memories of them
are sitting in bed,
reading the paper,
always smoking, always smoking,
and their sheets had multiple,
multiple cigarette burns
and holes in them.
It's just... It's, like, that's
literally burned into my memory.
♪
Krueger: In 1949,
Rothko develops the style
that will make him one of
the most recognized artists
of the 20th century.
♪
Christopher: He finds
a format where he can make full
and direct expression
of the ideas
he's wanted to express
for so long.
Guenther: For me,
the excitement in '49 to '50
are the way
he celebrates the edge.
♪
Color blocks come together,
and they begin to sit
in relationship to each other.
It is that gap between in which
the magic begins to develop.
Fujimura: There's a turning
point in your life
that you can just mark and say,
"This is when I found my voice,"
voice that is a destination
of everything
that you've done in the past,
and that is a fertile place
for an artist.
♪
He was always
in self-doubt mode,
always struggled
with his own internal voice.
So when Rothko found his style,
he settled in that place
of belonging.
Guenther: It represented
the penultimate expression
of that thing that Rothko had
looked for his entire life.
He found a place to live
and celebrate
and a vehicle for his anguish.
♪
Christopher: My father
and Pollock and de Kooning
and Motherwell quickly become
household names
through articles in places like
Life Magazine.
Suddenly, these were
the wunderkinds at age 50
of the art world.
Guenther: By the '50s,
when Rothko hits his stride,
he starts to sell.
Betty Parsons Gallery
represents him,
and she does a series
of five shows,
each of them
more and more successful.
Mark: I was walking up
to my house last week,
and a couple was passing.
The lady looks inside my window
and says,
"Ooh, I wonder who owns
all those Rothkos."
Just like that,
I've become a noun... a Rothko.
Ken: A commodity.
Mark: An overmantel.
Ken: A what?
Mark: The overmantels,
you know,
those paintings doomed
to become mere decoration
over the fireplace
in the fancy-schmancy penthouse.
Oh, they say to you,
"I need something to work
with the sofa."
You understand?
"Something bright and cheery
for the breakfast nook,
which is orange.
You got something in orange
or burnt umber or seafoam green?
Here's a paint chip
from the Sherwin-Williams.
Oh, and can you chop it down
to fit the sideboard?"
Logan: In 1958,
the Seagram's Corporation
finished constructing
an amazing modernist building
on Park Avenue,
and within this
modernist masterpiece,
there's going to be
a beating heart
and it's gonna be a restaurant
called The Four Seasons.
And architect Philip Johnson
went to Mark Rothko and said,
"Why don't you create
a series of murals
that could go
in our dining room?"
The commission was $35,000,
and in 1958,
that was a huge amount of money,
reputed to be the most an artist
had ever been paid in America
for a series of works.
Mark: My first murals.
Imagine a frieze
all around the room,
a continuous narrative filling
the walls one to another,
each a new chapter,
the story unfolding.
You look, and they are there,
inescapable and inexorable.
Logan:
I mean, of all the patrons
who could have
approached Mark Rothko,
Philip Johnson was unique
because he was a provocative
voice in American design
and American art,
and Rothko admired him greatly.
So for him, it was the perfect
combination of voices
creating modern art.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro:
The Seagram paintings,
they're an artist experimenting
with much less color.
♪
This is an enormous challenge
for an artist to take on,
an artist that's known
primarily for color.
He's doing something
very different,
and I think they must have
been very hard for him.
Christopher:
There is some question
about what he was told,
what he understood
about what the nature of that
restaurant was going to be.
Kate: His story was that
he would be painting
for an employees' dining room
and, as an old Socialist,
that made him feel,
you know,
reasonably comfortable,
but I think he may
have known more than that.
In the fall of 1959,
they were invited to dinner
at the restaurant,
which since then
had been completed,
but I remember
their coming home.
My father was so upset
by his visit to the restaurant
that he came in yelling,
you know,
that he was absolutely
going to withdraw from this,
and I'm sure my mother
was trying to calm him down.
Mark: Philip?
This is Rothko.
Listen, I went to
the restaurant last night,
and let me tell you, anyone
who eats that kind of food
for that kind of money
in that kind of joint
will never look
at a painting of mine.
Now, I-I-I'm sending
the money back,
and I'm keeping the pictures.
Ye... No offense.
Yeah, well, this is
the way it goes.
Good luck to you, buddy.
Logan: I think there must have
been a liberation in that call,
in realizing it was
the truest version of himself.
♪
Christopher: My father
was nothing if not principled,
and ultimately he cared more
about the well-being
of his artwork
and the expressive message
that he was trying to bring
than the prestige of having
the Seagram commission
and even the $35,000,
which he sorely needed.
Guenther: And so those murals,
which he had labored on
for months
and started again and rebuilt
just went into storage.
They effectively were hidden.
I think the Seagram
mural process
helped define Rothko
as an individual.
It comes back
to his questioning,
his politics,
and his reality as an artist,
the artist as underdog,
as thorn in the side of society,
as observer.
♪
Christopher: In 1964,
my father was commissioned
by the de Menil family
of Houston
to create what was then
going to be a Catholic chapel
on the University of St. Thomas
campus in Houston.
I think my father felt
that John and Dominique
really understood
his seriousness as an artist
and the... the deeper meaning
or the deeper content
behind his paintings.
♪
Molina: "The magnitude
on every level of experience
and meaning of the task
in which you have involved me
exceeds all my preconceptions,
and it is teaching me
to extend myself
beyond what I thought
was possible for me.
For this, I thank you."
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro: It must have
been a huge compliment to him.
Not only, in this case,
was he given a space
as he was at the Seagram's,
here he had an opportunity
for the space
and the paintings
to work together,
to take the works of art
to another dimension.
Kate:
In order to create this space,
he found a carriage house
on 69th Street in New York.
It allowed him to re-create
three walls of the chapel.
I frequently saw him sitting and
agonizing about the paintings,
and I mean down to the inch,
down to every layering of paint,
the exact heights
of the different panels.
Christopher: I visited
my father in the studio
many times as a child,
and although I never
saw him paint,
because he really did not like
people to watch him paint...
It was really a
solitary journey for him...
He set up long rolls of paper
for me to paint on
and was very encouraging,
and I was just thrilled
to be in that space
and spending time with him.
I remember his warmth
and his enthusiasm
about me being there with him.
♪
Mancusi-Ungaro:
The Rothko Chapel
is very much dark paintings.
An urban legend is that
he painted these paintings
'cause he was so depressed.
They were a sign,
an omen of his upcoming death.
♪
I don't think it was that
at all.
I look at it that it was
a natural progression
of where he was going.
He had done so much with color.
He was a master of color and its
ability to affect the viewer.
His next step was to take
the challenge to eliminate it.
Could he still make paintings?
Could he still make works of art
that had that effect?
♪
Fujimura:
To enter into Rothko Chapel
is to enter
into a person's soul.
It's kind of a Zen experience.
♪
To be surrounded
by these works...
and feel your way
into a painting
rather than seeing them,
you can directly go
to the emotions, the feeling,
and that's a contribution
that I think very few artists
have ever reached.
♪
Christopher:
The Rothko Chapel remains,
I think, a very difficult space
for me.
It's one that I don't walk into
without thinking that I'm going
to spend some time there.
The chapel doesn't just invite.
It really demands the viewer
to spend time
and think about
the big questions.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
I like being in the chapel
because I like the sense
of being with self,
and it's really
a remarkable sensation
to go in the chapel
that's quiet and cool
and to sit and to just look
at these paintings
and to see the daylight
moving through it.
They're not individual
paintings.
The work of art
is the entire experience.
It's the space.
It's the light.
It's the paintings.
♪
It's a wonderful experience.
I encourage everyone to do it.
♪
Guenther: Rothko finishes
the chapel murals in 1967,
and they go into storage.
The chapel won't open
until 1971.
It was a moment at which
he had completed
the most important work
of his life, in his mind,
and then in April 1968,
he suffers a dissecting
aortic aneurysm.
It is one of the most serious
things that can happen to you,
short of a heart attack
or stroke.
And for the next year
and a half, he struggles.
His doctor doesn't want him
to work on canvas.
Physically, he can't lift
his arms over 40 degrees.
Christopher:
It's actually a small miracle
that he... he survived this
because it was a significant...
It was a large rupture.
Kate:
Only mode of treatment
was to lower the blood pressure
fairly extremely,
and I think, you know,
that not only exhausted him,
but, you know,
may have contributed in itself
to his depression, as well.
♪
After that time,
he really was limited
in what he could do
with his paintings.
However, it's interesting
because that was perhaps his...
One of his most prolific
six to eight months
of his entire career.
Christopher: He starts
what have become known
as the Black on Gray canvases,
as well as a series of ambitious
large-scale works on paper.
Kate:
And then, surprisingly,
a group of large papers
in pastels,
which is perhaps
the most amazing,
a real departure also from
what he had ever done.
I believe now, looking back,
that he was struggling
with an underlying
depressive illness.
Certainly there were
family problems.
He had separated from my mother,
which was difficult.
He was living in the studio,
which must have been
a difficult setting,
I think a depressing setting
in a lot of ways.
On February 25, 1970,
some time in the early hours
of the morning,
as far as we know,
my father took his own life,
um...
and he was found
the next morning by a young man
who had been assisting him in
the studio during that period,
and, um...
only subsequently did my mother
come to the studio and see him.
I was surprised,
but not as devastated
as when my mother told me
how it had happened.
My first reaction
was that he had died
of something
related to his illness.
Christopher: My father
had worked for four years
exclusively
on the chapel commission.
He did not live to see it.
He died just as construction
was beginning.
So all plans had been completed,
but he never was able
to see the space himself.
Mancusi-Ungaro:
But he did have the experience
of the mural in his studio,
so he certainly had
a sense of it,
and he was very proud of it.
He had his official
portrait taken,
obviously satisfied with them.
♪
♪
♪
Gale: People definitely
seek out the Rothko room
here at Tate Modern.
I think we can confidently say
that it's seen by millions
of people every year.
♪
I think one would like to
believe that there is a sense
of the longevity of the artist
through this room.
It did become a space
which is in tune
with Rothko's own wishes
about it.
It is a place to decompress
and to think about
bigger issues in life.
♪
Molina: People are still
obsessing about his work,
and his work
is still being analyzed
and... and re-evaluated.
I think he would have been
very happy with that.
I mean, I think the fact
that people
are still engaged in a dialogue,
in a relationship with his work
probably the best thing
any artist could wish for.
♪
Fujimura: Part of what he wanted
was future generations
to find his work so inspiring
and challenging.
♪
And that impossibility
of Mark Rothko
is a puzzle
that I want to be part of,
to open up, not to solve,
but to open up to the next
generation and beyond.
♪
Molina: "The most important tool
the artist fashions
through constant practice
is the faith in his ability
to produce miracles
when they are needed.
Pictures must be miraculous."
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪