Rothko: The Experience of Colour

Rothko said that a painting is not just the visual representation of an experience, or even a record of an experience. A painting is the experience itself.
I had never really thought of Rothko as anything more than a bit of a dabbler in colour. I knew the paintings, of course, and I knew the name, but somehow I had never really got Rothko. Clearly, there was much more to him than that. There certainly was.
And so, during our little stay in Florence, we managed to catch the last few days of the exhibition devoted to this artist. And I have to say, I came out of it thinking: what an absolute artist he was.
He really did make you experience what he painted.
And it was all to do with colour. Colour and colour.
After all, if there is no colour, there is no painting. That is the basic thing.
I still couldn’t quite decide whether Rothko was a minimalist painter or whether that was completely the wrong way of looking at him. But frankly, it didn’t matter. I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition. And it was a very enjoyable exhibition, because it took you right through from the beginnings to the end, and you could actually see how this extraordinary artist developed from his pre-war works.

And I began to realise what an incredible person he was.
He came from a Russian-Jewish family. His parents escaped from a period of terrible hardship and came to America. And then, at some stage in his life, Rothko decided that he wanted to become a painter and an artist.
But he wasn’t somebody who had gone through the normal artistic discipline. He didn’t attend an art college. He didn’t have some great academic training behind him.
He more or less did it himself.
And he developed this incredible fixation with painting.
That fixation was already there in his earlier work, when he was painting urban scenes and the world around him. And some of those early paintings I found very interesting. There was something almost Delaunay-like about them. Robert Delaunay, I mean. I suspect that he may well have come across Delaunay at some point.
But then it all happened after the war.
That was when Rothko really began to find his true oeuvre, if that’s the right word. He began to paint these extraordinary paintings which we now immediately recognise as Rothko.
And people call them abstractions.
I’m not sure they are.
There are no people in them. There are no landscapes. There isn’t anything that you can actually identify as a particular object. But I don’t think they are simply abstract paintings.
They are experiential paintings.
The whole object is that you can only really appreciate a Rothko by standing in front of it. You have to stop thinking about everything else. You almost have to clear your mind.
It’s almost like meditation.
And then you enter this amazing universe of colour that he presents you with.
And what amazed me was that the colour actually seemed to move.
In the earlier paintings, with all those wonderful reds and oranges and yellows, particularly the yellows, I could actually see the colour moving in front of me. It was almost like a symphony.

It really was a symphony.
Each colour was separate, absolutely separate, and yet somehow it belonged to the colour next to it. There were these edges, these borders, almost as if one colour was tagged on to the next.
And it was incredible.
Then you moved on from that rather bright period — almost a happy period, I would say — into the development of the greens and the blues.

And suddenly it became more serious.
The green and blue entered into the paintings and it became much more of a dialectic between colour and space.
Because there is a lot of space in Rothko.
And that was another thing I found so fascinating: the spatial aspect of his paintings.
The painting almost became an architecture of colour.
And I think that is where his interest in murals becomes so important. He began thinking about paintings on a much larger scale, paintings that would surround you and become an environment rather than simply something hanging on a wall.
And then, of course, there is Italy.
Rothko became very interested in Italian art. He was particularly fascinated by Fra Angelico and the paintings at San Marco in Florence. And he felt a real kinship with Michelangelo.
Especially, I think, with Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library.
There is something very strange about that architecture. The windows are cut off from the normal light, and yet there is light. There is light in the space.
And somehow Rothko understood that.
He could take something that came from Michelangelo and turn it into something which, on the surface, looked completely different.
But then, I suppose, that is what artists do.
We’re all influenced by other artists. We see something in somebody else and, in our own little way, we take it and produce our own interpretation.
Rothko’s interpretation was phenomenal.
And then we came to the final part of the exhibition.
And this was where it became very emotional for me.
Rothko’s life had been blighted by depression, alcoholism and health problems. And by the end, the paintings had become very different.
The last paintings, particularly those with the grey bordering onto the black, were extraordinarily powerful.
I just sat in front of them.
And I was completely bowled over.

There was something about them which went beyond the actual painting. You weren’t simply looking at grey and black. You were somehow experiencing something.
And that brought me back to what Rothko had said in the first place.
A painting isn’t a representation of an experience.
It is the experience itself.
I think I finally understood that.
And then came the shock.
I hadn’t realised that Rothko had taken his own life.
I knew that he had suffered from depression, but I hadn’t really understood the extent of it. And discovering that at the end of this extraordinary journey through his paintings was a very big shock.
But then, perhaps, I could understand why.
I have known people who have been destroyed by depression. Rothko was, in the end, destroyed by it too.
And yet he produced all this extraordinary work.
And he died so young.
He was only 66. And for somebody of our age, 66 seems terribly young. He died more than half a century ago, and yet here we are, standing in front of his paintings in Florence, and they still have the power to affect us.
That, for me, is extraordinary.
I went into the exhibition thinking that Rothko was perhaps somebody who painted large coloured rectangles.
I came out thinking that he was one of the most extraordinary painters I had ever encountered.
Because he didn’t simply give us colour.
He gave us the experience of colour.
He gave us space, composition, light and darkness. He gave us paint itself in its most fundamental and minimalist form.
And somehow, from those very simple ingredients, he created something enormous.
I really am so pleased that we managed to experience those last few days of the Rothko exhibition in Florence.
And full praise to the organisers, because it was beautifully put together. It took you right through his life and his development, and allowed you to see how he arrived at those final, extraordinary paintings.
I didn’t think I understood Rothko.
Perhaps I still don’t.
But I experienced him.
And I’m very glad I did.