still breathing

So often I see people look at Rothko late work and say "this is why he killed himself you can see the depression," or "this is when the decline started." I understand why people feel this way but as Christopher Rothko has mentioned, people are so aware that he killed himself they tend to read his career backwards informed by the end of it. And that distorts its meaning

Elaine de Kooning mentioned that Jeannie Reynal gave great parties and the paintings that she owned of Rothko looked great in that environment. "They made a wonderful graceful decor, all of which was anathema to Rothko," she said.

This addresses a theme in Rothko's career pretty well. He's about this color as spiritualism and for him it represents other things but he's very good with color it's sensual and in the mid 50s and early 60s he had this masterful touch with it, gorgeous large, well realized presentations. These are the classic paintings that built his following. And that's just the problem he has with them

Rothko sees his prices go up and collectors flock to him and becomes depressed that they are not feeling the same thing that he is, they are investing and worse, decorating. This is also a theme of the Seagram murals where he thew away a very large commission because he didn't want to paint the backgrounds where the upper classes dwelled

Rothko starts to limit his color palette in his reflection of these feelings and you can see it in number of ways. In 64 he paints a series of black paintings, something he's never done before and this is the same year he's starting to work on the chapel pictures which are gigantic monolithic tomes of black over red. Paintings in the chapel have measurements like 15 feet × 8 feet 9 inches. Rothko is very excited about this commission, he gets along very well with Ms. de Menil as they share a poetic nature.

At this point Rothko is fully immersed in black paintings but he's not uncharacteristically depressed, rather he's working on what he thinks will be major work of his career.

He's getting into his religious twilight, letting the colors in his paintings speak in the dark constantly conscious of how they are over lit and one gets the feeling likes these commissions because he's never liked having regular art shows. He can't control the environment enough, he only wants his paintings seen with his own work and he doesn't want a lot of light on it.

And because of his characteristic layering technique, it's very likely he's not thinking of the black as black but as two colors or more.

His friend Stanley Kunitz says "he did, as I recall, propose at one point when we were talking a theory of the black embracing all colors and being capable of all sorts of nuances so that it wasn't a monolithic color."

Rothko's life did start to fall apart he was getting divorced, he had heart problems he started working smaller because he couldn't lift the larger paintings anymore and of course she's drinking had been a problem for a long time but it was not a linear process. Rothko was depressed his whole life maybe because of his background, maybe his childhood, maybe his War with money or his insecurity about his place in history but as he starts doing the series of paintings that involve more dark colors and the dark paintings of 1969 I think it's a stretch to say that this tonality that he had worked with for now years is a sign of mental illness. Rather he was always struggling and always painting bright colors too.

And of course this is not just my opinion

"Rothko may also have moved to a darker palette because dark paintings are more difficult to see; that is, differences between dark colors are less easily discerned than those between bright or light colors, and this is especially the case when dark pictures are displayed in low light. Rothko wanted his pictures "to arrive slowly in one's consciousness.", Donald McKinney observed, "and he hoped to foster a more intense aesthetic experience by fostering a longer viewing experience. "

As we look at Rothko's last painting, it is uncharacteristically loose and dense, but it is not black nor are many of the works that he painted that year.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.