When (and How) Rothko Became Rothko

Mark Rothko only got as far as his sophomore year at Yale before fleeing that WASP nest of anti-Semitism and elitism. Forty-six years later, Yale awarded him an honorary degree in philosophy, but in the meantime the artist wielded his philosophy as much as his paintbrush in pursuit of a kind of painting that matched his kind of thinking. In the exhibition and companion catalog Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950, we follow Rothko’s path through ten years that saw no less than six distinctive styles of painting, but that resulted in one of the most recognizable signature styles in all of modern art. If you’ve ever wondered how Rothko became Rothko, “to understand Rothko—to see his artistic evolution, comprehend his goals and the means he used to realize them, to live his internal struggle to manifest the human soul and chart that manifestation,” writes Rothko’s son Christopher in the catalog, “one need only study the 1940s.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "When (and How) Rothko Became Rothko."

[Many thanks to Rizzoli USA for providing me with a review copy of the exhibition catalog Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950. Many thanks also the Columbia Museum of Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950, which runs through January 6, 2013.]

[Image: Mark Rothko, American (born Russia), 1903−1970. Untitled (Man and Two Women in a Pastoral Setting), c. 1940. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 1986.43.53. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

The Great Chain of Being

I’ll confess that I will always find the idea of the Great Chain of Being attractive, despite what post-modernists say. Just call me old fashioned. My mind simply works better when trying to find a connect everything to everything else in a coherent universe, especially when it comes to art. Even someone as game-changing and ground-breaking as Edouard Manet cannot escape the net. Born January 23, 1832, Manet finds himself hailed as the father of modern art, the first artist to break with the old sensibilities and depict modern life as it is, shorn of all falsifying mythology. Manet offered The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) (above, from 1863) as a first glimpse of that brave new world. Yet, how much of this is really new? Art historians point out that Manet “borrowed” the composition from a drawing by Raphael of The Judgement of Paris. The strange, “modern” juxtaposition of dressed and nude figures may have come from Manet’s study of the Renaissance paintings in the Louvre. Sixteenth century works The Pastoral Concert and The Tempest, both likely begun by Giorgione and completed by his student Titian, set the stage for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As much as we may want to isolate Manet as a lone genius blazing a trail into the unknown, Manet steps backwards and points to the past to point to the future.

Where The Luncheon on the Grass befuddled, Manet’s Olympia (above), also from 1863, enraged. Manet completely gives up the pretense of mythology as a way of making the female nude acceptable. But how valid was the entire pretense of mythologizing nudes, especially female nudes, to begin with? Again, Manet looked to the Renaissance and Titian, particularly The Venus of Urbino. The gamesmanship of calling a recognizably realistic nude a Venus or Aphrodite and thus giving the painting respectability always seemed a strange gentleman’s agreement. Manet breaks that agreement in Olympia, recognizing that Titian himself most likely never fully signed on either. As “modern” as Olympia appears, her knowing and direct look reflects similar glances in previous artists as well. Goya's Nude Maja, which Manet most likely knew in some form from his study of Spanish paining since Velazquez, challenges the viewer with her eyes more than half a century before Manet’s Olympia does. Manet rejects the idea that confident women comfortable in their skin can only be fictional and simultaneously points back to all the “real” women since the Renaissance.

Manet, however, didn’t turn a blind eye to the art world going on around him. Although he never accepted the label “Impressionist” or agreed to exhibit with the Impressionists, Manet appreciated what the Impressionists were trying to accomplish and became friends with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro. Manet’s Self-Portrait With Palette (above, from 1879) shows Manet trying to keep up with the times and paint in an Impressionist manner himself, momentarily abandoning his clear draftsmanship yet still clinging to his dark, Spanish background. Even more forward-thinking, Manet encouraged women artists Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès when even some Impressionists continued to cling to the all-boys’ club mentality. Manet falls into the cracks between many categories because he doesn’t paint like a true realist and his works are Impressionist in their independent spirit yet not Impressionist in visual style. The inability to lump Manet in with others isolates him. In truth, Manet belongs everywhere, stretching across styles and even across space and time. More than his art, it is Manet’s mind, always searching for new ways of seeing with total disregard for the rules, that helps create the atmosphere in which modern art is born.

Aging Gracefully

While others stoked the fires of the Italian Renaissance in Florence and Rome, Giovanni Bellini set the early standard in Venice until his death on November 29, 1516. Born 1430, Bellini introduced a sensuality and warmth to the religious standards that had become cold and stale over time. His painting of St. Francis in Ecstasy (above, from 1480) places the world-renouncing saint within a beautiful panorama of nature. Although St. Francis of Assisi is shown at the moment of highest communion with the divine, God never “shows his face” in this painting, except in the details of his creation all around Francis. St. Francis almost becomes dwarfed in the larger scheme of nature here, downplaying him and, by extension, all humanity in contrast to the bigger picture of all of creation. Bellini thus gives new life to a familiar standard of religious iconography and actually manages to recreate the original spirit of St. Francis himself, who strove to become attuned to nature and use it as another pathway to God.

One of the dangers of looking through religious art of Renaissance Europe is becoming numb to the similarities not only between works by the same artist but works on the same theme by different artists. All those crucifixions and pietas quickly blur together. That sameness makes the difference of Bellini’s Dead Christ Supported by Angels (Pietà) (above, from 1474) all the more surprising and enjoyable. Bellini’s introduction of angels isn’t new or unique, of course, but he took that twist and twisted it even further, giving the individual angels personality beyond that of stock figure cherubs attending the fallen Christ. The expression on the face of the angel furthest to the right as he muses upon the wound piercing Christ’s left hand captures perfectly the mixture of melancholy and mystery the pieta was designed to invoke in the viewer. You can almost read the psychology on the faces of the other angels depicting an entire range of intensity yet still operating within that same emotional framework.

When Albrecht Dürer visited Venice in 1506 he hailed the 76-year-old Bellini as still the best painter in the city. Bellini drew around him a circle of followers and students, including Giorgione and Titian, who would continue and extend Bellini’s ideas of color and ideal of injecting the personal into public works. As the times changed, Bellini allowed himself to change with them right up to the end. At the age of 85, Bellini painted his first nude female, Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror (above, from 1515). Perhaps Bellini had Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus in mind when painting his homage to the female form. Perhaps the freedom to break barriers that Bellini instilled in his students came back to him and freed him in return. Whereas Giorgione “legitimized” his nude with a mythological reference, Bellini’s work shows no bowing to convention. To the end, Bellini believed in the beauty of God’s creation, including that of the human body, as the greatest expression of divine power and, most importantly, divine love.

International Man of Mystery

When Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco died, most likely from plague around November 6, 1510, the man known better as “Big George” or Giorgione left behind more questions than he or his art ever answered. Born either in 1477 or 1478, the tragically young artist befuddled and astonished contemporaries by turns. In an age that called upon artists to express religious truths in imagery for all to understand, Giorgione instead worked in enigmatic shadow. His Self-Portrait as David (above), now just a fragment of the larger work showing the hero holding the head of Goliath, shows the young artist posing with an expression that pronounces neither triumph nor regret. Giorgione’s self-portrait could easily be mistaken for one of Gustave Courbet’s many self-aware, mysterious self-portraits—an amazing comparison considering that Giorgione painted roughly 350 years before Courbet. One of the prime contenders for “father of modern painting” remains Titian, yet Giorgione either taught or studied beside that innovator. Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary, believed that Giorgione and Leonardo da Vinci should share credit for founding modern painting. Such debates are irresolvable, but Giorgione’s role, whatever that may be specifically, remains undisputed.

Giorgione broke all the rules in painting works that refused to tell a clear story—historical, religious, or mythological. Gabriele Vendramin, a leading intellectual in Giorgione’s Venice, commissioned Giorgione to paint The Tempest (above) in 1508. We all clearly see the woman and child on the right and the man on the left. Indistinct ruins as well as verdant vegetation surround them. A bolt of lightning splits the dramatic sky above them. What all that means, however, is engagingly unclear. Perhaps Giorgione painted The Tempest as a test for his patron—an intellectual puzzle with endless solutions, none of which could be “wrong.” Everything in the picture is natural and realistic, but Giorgione leaves them disconnected enough for us to fill in the blanks. Such fertile mystery informs the later landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and stretches even into modern times in the works of artists ranging from Giorgio de Chirico to Andrew Wyeth. In our modern (perhaps post-modern) world, we’re accustomed to such disconnect in our art, so it’s hard to fathom just how unfathomable Giorgione’s works such as The Tempest first seemed.


When Giorgione died, he left several works unfinished, such as The Sleeping Venus (aka, The Dresden Venus; above, from 1510). Titian finished many of these works, which has led to difficulties in attribution between the two. Decades later, in 1538, Titian returned to Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus by painting The Venus of Urbino. Whereas Giorgione’s Venus lushly stretches in her sleep, unaware of viewers and dreaming of things we can only guess at, Titian’s Venus confronts the viewer eye to eye, short-circuiting all the mystery. When Édouard Manet painted Olympia, the work that many feel launched the Impressionist movement and all the movements that followed, he may have fused visually Giorgione’s and Titian’s nude goddesses. Manet copied the direct stare of Titian, but he also conveyed the sense of mystery in Giorgione through details such as the black cat and maidservant. Some scholars believe that Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, another key early work in modern art, owes much to Giorgione’s The Tempest in its strange, quiet mystery. Thus, Manet, another potential “father of modern art,” looked back to Giorgione and rediscovered unanswered questions that still fired the imagination.

A Sun Among Stars

When critics search for the “father” of modern, twentieth century art, they continually roll the calendar back further and further, beginning with Picasso, then Manet, and then usually Velazquez, finding the earlier “father” by looking at whoever the preceding “father” was looking at and learning from. El Greco often gets a nod, which seems quite false considering how his influence and popularity is largely a modern phenomenon—a case of “fatherhood” after the fact. As argued in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (reviewed here), the succession seems to end in the person of Titian, whom even contemporaries called "the sun amidst small stars" during the star-studded Italian Renaissance. Titian died on August 27, 1576, leaving no direct heirs, but artists such as Velazquez, El Greco, and Manet all looked to him for inspiration and guidance. Born sometime between 1477 and 1490 (maybe), Titian’s origins are lost to us, but his role as the origin of much of the modern art sensibility are increasingly being understood. In works such as his Bacchus and Ariadne (above, from 1520-1523), we see Titian’s famous gift for color along with his amazing eye for composition. Such inventive re-envisioning of mythological themes provided a template for later artists to riff on old material in new ways that modern artists still use.

When it comes to artistic bravado, the first names you may think of are Courbet or Pollock, but Titian knew the true meaning of attitude before all of the moderns. Over the centuries, many candidates have stepped up as the model for the Man with the Blue Sleeve (above, from 1510)—the poet Ariosto, one of Titian’s patrons, even Titian himself. What can’t be questioned is the arrogance in the sitter’s eye. The hyperrealism of the painting once led many to think that Giorgione, one of Titian’s contemporaries, was the artist, but the swagger of the sleeve dangling over the side of the window frame is pure Titian. Like Michelangelo, Titian flourished in the patronage-driven art world of the Renaissance while never pandering to the market, letting his amazing skills do the talking. Again, the famous Titian color bursts out of the dark background with the stunning blue of the man’s sleeve, but it is the psychological acuity of the face of elitism that serves as Titian’s signature here.

Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting concentrated on the last twenty-five years of Titian’s life, when his brushwork became increasingly loose and expressive. In Danaë (above, from 1544-1545), Titian paints the nude with the softness and freedom that the Impressionists would later make famous. The pose itself, in which a large-scale nude sprawls across the width of the image, may have inspired Manet to paint his Olympia, the work that launched the Impressionist movement or at least the antiestablishment wing of modern art. Like Manet’s Olympia, Titian’s Danaë takes a real-life courtesan (allegedly the mistress of a Cardinal who commissioned the painting) and mixes contemporary sexual reality and ancient mythology into a crossover hit that coexists on both planes. Such self-conscious playfulness with the nature of reality itself, combined with all his other innovations, helps place Titian on the throne of “father” of modern art, at least until the next artist comes along to topple him off.