You might as well get one thing straight . . . I’m not an abstractionist.—Mark Rothko to Selden Rodman, 1957
It has long been one of the curiosities of abstract art that so many of its practitioners have denied that they were in fact abstract artists. To have created works of art that were seen to be “merely” a mode of abstraction has been, for these artists, a considerable vexation, and some have gone to great lengths to—in their view—set the record straight on this question. But whether they actually succeeded in this project of denial or only added further impediments to our understanding of abstract art—including their own—remains a matter of debate.
It is a debate, moreover, that is certain to acquire a renewed momentum now that abstract art has lost its radical status and has passed into the hands of the art historians as a subject for research and interpretation. It is when an art no longer commands the distinction of radical novelty, and therefore no longer serves as a model for a new generation of “advanced” artists, that the task of explaining its “meaning” becomes especially problematical. A change in taste occurs, and the old aesthetic loyalties no longer obtain with the force they once did. There is a need to understand what it was about this art that held so many gifted artists in its thrall and persuaded so many connoisseurs of its importance. At the same time, however, there is likely to be a revisionist impulse at work in this search for “meaning”—an impulse that seeks to align the old art under study with the interests of the new art that has displaced it. If, as happens to be the case at the present moment, these interests are more closely focused on the “content” of art than they are 6 5 son its form, then we can expect the new interpretations of abstract art to follow a similar course.
This is what I believe has now happened with the study of abstract art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. Abstraction continues to be copiously produced, of course—and sometimes at a significant level of aesthetic achievement. But it can no longer be said to set the agenda for new artistic developments. (This doesn’t mean that it might not do so again at some future date, but that is a different question.) Hence the proliferation of attempts to explain what abstract art was really about in its heyday.
What makes the whole issue especially perplexing is the even more fundamental question of whether this debate about the “meaning” of abstraction, though initially prompted by the effort of certain abstract artists to deny that they were abstractionists, makes any discernible difference in our experience of the works themselves. When, for example, we find ourselves in the presence of Mark Rothko’s Number 22 (1949) in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, what is there in what we see in the abstract forms of this painting that can be taken to refer to, or to embody, the metaphysical “subject” which the artist himself claimed for the work? Is that claim to be taken literally? If not, then in what sense is it to be taken? If we cannot actually see the artist’s metaphysical “subject” in the physical object he has created for the avowed purpose of giving it expression, how can that subject be said to be present in the work?
Questions of this sort have often been raised about Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings—the paintings, that is, that he produced from 1949 until his death in 1970—and with good reason. For it is well known that Rothko himself spurned the very idea that he was in any sense an abstract painter, yet the paintings themselves have long been taken—both by those who love them and by those who do not—to represent a particularly pure and even extreme form of abstraction. In his lifetime, Rothko made this issue of denial a crucial test for his admirers, and as a result they tended, by and large, to support his claim without significantly clarifying it. On at least one occasion, however, the claim was upheld so zealously that even Rothko appeared to shrink from endorsing it. I refer to the catalogue written by Peter Selz for the Rothko exhibition he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. In the short essay that Mr. Selz wrote for that catalogue, he began by declaring that “[Rothko’s] paintings can be likened to annunciations,” and invoked the example of Fra Angelico to support such a reading. He ended with a flight of interpretative fancy that, though it was obviously intended as lavish praise, the artist himself recoiled from. The relevant paragraphs of Mr. Selz’s text are too long to quote here in their entirety, but the following excerpts will convey something of their flavor:
Eventually as other images occur to the viewer the metaphor of the creation of some universe becomes paramount. And increasingly—in the mind of this writer—these “shivering bars of light” assume a function similar to that loaded area between God’s and Adam’s fingers on the Sistine ceiling. . . . Rothko has given us the first, not the sixth, day of creation.
The open rectangles suggest the rims of flame in containing fires, or the entrances to tombs, like the doors to the dwellings of the dead in Egyptian pyramids, behind which the sculptors kept the kings “alive” for eternity in the ka. . . . Indeed, the whole series of these murals brings to mind an Orphic cycle; their subject might be death and resurrection in classical, not Christian, mythology; the artist descending to Hades to find the Eurydice of his vision. The door to the tomb opens for the artist in search of his muse.
This was surely less a case of an “artist in search of his muse” than of an art historian in search of something—anything—to say about an art he couldn’t comprehend. Never mind that Rothko himself, with all his talk about myth and tragedy and timeless subjects, had been responsible for leading Mr. Selz astray. Artists are given license in these matters that art historians appropriate at their peril. What Mr. Selz wrote on that occasion was all the sheerest nonsense, and was perceived to be nonsense at the time. Sidney Geist wrote a hilarious and devastating analysis of the essay in a short-lived publication called Scrap, and Rothko himself then asked the museum to withdraw the essay when it sent his exhibition abroad. I followed these developments with a keen interest while they were occurring, and not only because Mr. Geist and his collaborator on Scrap, Anita Ventura, were friends and colleagues but because the essay that I had commissioned the late Robert Goldwater to write about the Rothko show for Arts Magazine, which I was then editing, was the one that Rothko selected for the catalogue accompanying the European tour of the exhibition.
Well, all of this happened a long time ago, and would scarcely be worth recalling now if not for the publication of a new book on Rothko that makes an even more elaborate attempt to illuminate the artist’s “subject” than the one Mr. Selz undertook nearly thirty years ago. Given the changes that have occurred in the intellectual climate of the art world, it is my impression that this new book—Anna C. Chave’s Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction— is likely to meet with a more sympathetic response than Mr. Selz’s essay did. And, of course, the artist is no longer around to register his objections and thereby discredit a fanciful interpretation of his work. We are indeed in a new period, and I have an awful feeling that Professor Chave’s book may very well represent its spirit—at least as far as the study of abstract art is concerned.
Thus, where Mr. Selz spoke only of “images [that] occur to the viewer,” which obliquely acknowledged that they were, after all, his images rather than Rothko’s, Professor Chave seems to believe that the images—or “traces,” as she sometimes calls them—that occur to her in studying Rothko’s paintings are actually present (in some sense) in the work itself. At least she seems to believe this some of the time, and her professors at Yale, where the original version of this book was accepted as a doctoral dissertation in art history, were apparently persuaded that this represented a perfectly legitimate reading of the artist’s classic abstract paintings. Yet Professor Chave also appears, at other times, to believe that Rothko was indeed an abstract painter, and that her principal “discovery” in this book—that the abstract paintings are filled with discernible references to entombment and nativity motifs (among much else)—in no way contradicts that belief. Which, at the very least, raises the whole question of what an abstract painting is. Is it an art in which we can find “traces” of whatever our hearts and minds and the fashionable methodologies of academic study may wish us to find, or does what can be seen—and not seen—in the paintings place a limit on what can be said to be present in the painting?
“No doubt Rothko,” Professor Chave writes, “. . . did not consciously make all the quotations that may be discerned in his art, but that does not mean that they are not there.” She then continues:
The influence and the perpetuation of existing cultural forms is not something artists can fully escape, either by design or by ignorance. Tradition, as Harold Bloom wrote (following Freud), is “equivalent to repressed material in the mental life of the individual.”
What, then, does the “repressed material” of Rothko’s “tradition” consist of, according to Professor Chave?
The general answer she gives to this question is—well, almost everything that has been done in Western painting since the Renaissance.(Unlike Mr. Selz, she doesn’t go back to the Egyptian pyramids, though in truth there is nothing in her method to preclude such an option.)“Landscapes” and “portraits” are discovered to abound in Rothko’s abstract paintings—“Any of Rothko’s classic paintings could be described as having a portraitlike aspect or as bearing a trace of portraiture,” etc.—but it is in what Professor Chave calls their “vestiges or traces” of the figurative religious painting of the Renaissance that these paintings are claimed to be especially rich. Painful as it is for me to reproduce such nonsense in these pages, I am obliged to quote a representative passage from Professor Chave’s book, lest the reader think that I am exaggerating the extreme—and extremely foolish—degree to which she has carried this bizarre project of interpretation:
The pose of the sleeping infant Christ in Bellini’s Madonna and Sleeping Child prefigures the martyred Christ in the “sleep of death,” as found in Bellini’s Pietà, for example. Those images of Rothko’s that parallel the pictorial structure of a pietà, such as White Band (Number 27) and Number 20, 1950, might be said at the same time to parallel the structure of a conventional mother and child image. Further, and by the same logic, such tripartite pictures as the untitled yellow and black painting of 1953, which bear a relation to the pictorial structure of an entombment, also bear a relation to certain conventional adoration or nativity images; in the first instance the deceased is laid on the ground before its attendants, and in the second, the infant lies sleeping on the ground at its mother’s feet. But because Rothko’s abstract figures are far removed from human form, in any case, the specific scale of the supine or horizontal figure relative to that of the erect or vertical figure—the factor that explicitly tells viewers of a mimetic image whether they are looking at an entombment or a nativity—has no bearing in Rothko’s work. This basic schema, with a narrow band sandwiched between or below two larger masses, could yield an icon for the entire “human drama,” then, from the “tomb of the womb” to the “womb of the tomb.” His abstract figures could do (at the least) a double symbolic duty, that is, even where the symbols involved were opposing ones, such as birth and death. Rothko’s image-sign enabled him to elide or dismantle such conventional binaries and present them not as polar opposites but as interconnected, two sides of the same process or phenomenon.
No doubt it was on the basis of interpretative feats of this kind that Professor Chave received her present appointment to the Harvard faculty. One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.
“Viewers [of abstract painting],” Professor Chave writes, “are left in the tense and tantalizing position of feeling that they can almost but never quite grasp a message that they may sense as inhering in the pictures.” And earlier on she observes that “The message of the abstract painting veers decisively away from the textual or narrative, the explicitly recognizable and specifiable, into a more indeterminate realm.” Part of the problem with this kind of pictorial analysis, of course, is its crass assumption that an abstract painting is something like a telegram containing a “message” in a code we are called upon to crack. Professor Chave doesn’t call Rothko’s paintings telegrams, to be sure—she calls them “a palimpsest of traces,” as any academic semiologist in good standing would, I suppose. “The larger purpose of this book,” she writes, “is to show how Rothko’s pictures function polysemically,” which is as close as Professor Chave comes to acknowledging that the aesthetic issues in Rothko’s paintings—and, indeed, the aesthetic experience they afford, or fail to afford—have little or no interest for her. Her method in this book obliges her to deal with Rothko’s paintings as if they really are texts to be decoded. It is therefore no wonder that it is their alleged “message” that interests her, for there is nothing in her method that can account for anything else. And since the “message” itself is an invention of the author, the whole enterprise turns out to have remarkably little to do with Rothko or his art.
What it does have a lot to do with, however, is the current disfavor with which academic opinion views the aesthetics of abstraction and the priority that academic research now accords to the study of “content” in art even in cases, like this one, where the content has to be invented in order to serve as a subject suitable for study. I have to say that Professor Chave is quite brilliant at this kind of analytic invention; I am in as much awe of her powers of imagination as I am of her sheer intellectual effrontery. But the sad truth is, this book has nothing to tell us about Rothko or about abstract painting. It is a book—one among many, alas—about the crisis that has overtaken the study of art history in the universities.
Mark Rothko was hardly alone in rejecting the idea that he was in any sense an abstract artist. Many of the most illustrious names in the history of abstract art are known to have made similar denials. That many abstractionists were uneasy about venturing into this new aesthetic terrain, that they harbored doubts about the “meaning” of what they produced as abstract artists, that they sometimes made claims for their work, especially for its “content,” that defy easy understanding and sometimes even credulity—these and many related questions have long been familiar to anyone who has studied the subject. But the answers to such questions do not lie in the impulse to “interpret” abstraction or to allegorize it or decode it as if it were a hermetic text. A painting isn’t a text, and to pretend that it is one is to denigrate the very idea of abstract art, and to add yet another chapter—given its academic provenance, a particularly awful one—to the history of philistine response to its existence.
[1989]