1. Viewers assumed a lunar landscape, a shroud, a premonition.

   *What first comes to mind is decadence

   †Luxurious in its lack [of color]

   ‡Decaying in its nearness to his death [the following year]

   §Darkness does not stop the gaze – we can stare right through into the infinite

2. In a way, it’s a water pump, the old-fashioned kind one might find on a farm, with a handle.

   *The surge of water to purge clutter from the mind’s eye

3. At the last party Rothko threw, he hung his paintings from the Black on Grey series in a circle which he stayed inside the whole time, “where his magic was protecting him from all the terrors of unbridled humanity” (Robert Motherwell).

   *His emblems, his shields, his secret formulae against panic

   †For each of the works in the series, the dark is always at the top

4. Void.

   *Call of the

   †Null and

   ‡Fill the

5. A good painting about nothing.

   *Is ‘aboutness’ really less to do with the recipient than what’s being given?

6. Chromatic abstraction.

   *Sensuality of the surface

   †Turbulent brushwork

   ‡Distance

7. Floating or buried? 

8. He wanted, he worried, he worked.

   *Wanted to make money from the burgeoning art market, yet strove to resist the way it takes over one’s mind

   †Worried that the youngsters would outshine him, see him as the old model to be replaced

   ‡Worked to create something that would last, would say what he meant to say

9. In this series, seeing is slow and fast.

   *As the light reflects from paint to eye, something calls out

   †Something is imprisoned, pulsing

   ‡Nervous, restless

10. “You’ve had an aneurysm; you need to take care of yourself! Stop drinking, stop smoking, stop eating that garbage, take these pills for your anxiety” (his doctors).

    *He kept drinking

    †He kept smoking

    ‡He begrudgingly used smaller canvases

    §He switched from oils to acrylics as the brushstrokes were easier on his body, more immediate, all the better to render impulse as image

11. In general, the paintings from this series were not taken very seriously.

    *Devastating

    †Affirming

12. “No one understands me” (angsty teenagers, artists, human beings).

13. One critic called these blacks and greys “invisible painting.”

    *Before this, it had been his “euphoric veils of diaphanous pure color that led critics to praise him as a sensualist and a colorist, which pained him because he believed that his champions had lost sight of his serious intentions” (Jennifer Blessing).

    †What could be more serious than nothingness?

14. We look for clues. We crave a story, a narrative under all that paint. 

    *An end

    †A beginning

    ‡More likely – just different from what came before

15. “Hey! 

    Gentlemen! 

    Amateurs 

    of sacrilege, 

    crime, 

    and carnage, 

    have you seen 

    the terror of terrors—

    my face 

    when 

    I 

    am absolutely calm?” (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

16. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom...” (Mark Rothko).

    *And then suddenly he’d disappeared into that void

    †Sometimes the secret formulae cease their magic

Works cited

Dominique de Menil, inaugural address at the Rothko Chapel, in Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration. Frauke V. Josenhans, editor, Yale University Press, 2021.

Robert Motherwell in Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel. Annie Cohen-Solal, Yale University Press, 2015.

Jennifer Blessing, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3535

Max Kozloff, "Mark Rothko," The Art Journal, Spring 1961; reprinted in Renderings (New York, 1968).

Vladimir Mayakovsky, “The Cloud in Trousers”, in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Indiana University Press, 1975.

Mark Rothko, https://www.moma.org/artists/5047

The form of the piece is indebted to Janée J. Baugher.