Spiritual Experiences with Mark Rothko

By Julie Rogers

Spiritual Experiences with Mark Rothko
The National Gallery of Art in D.C. houses some of the world’s best pieces of art. The East Building of the NGA is becoming one of my favorite stops. Within the walls is an impressive display of Mark Rothko’s works, an extraordinary abstract expressionist artist.
According to Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, “Abstract Expressionism, the first major American avant-garde movement, emerged in New York in the 1940s. The artists…produced paintings that are abstract but express the artist’s state of mind…These artists turned inward to create. Their works had a look of rough spontaneity and exhibited a refreshing energy…As the artist Mark Rothko eloquently wrote:
"We assert man’s absolute emotions. We don’t need props or legends. We create images whose realities are self evident. Free ourselves from memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we make it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is understood by anyone who looks at it without nostalgic glasses of history.”
Mark Rothko studied painting for a brief time with Max Weber and Milton Avery, but he was primarily a self-taught painter. His early work dealt with abstract forms, street scenes and interior spaces with figures. In the late 1940s Rothko moved toward the abstract, beginning with various shapes and colors. By the early 1950s he had streamlined his work to two or three rectangles of floating colors on a colored background. His signature style of solid colors and rectangles of different shapes created almost a window-like effect in which the viewer could be transported to a place inside themselves and know truth. His later works became much darker; he worked with maroons, browns and finally created black on black panels although one of his latest works in 1969 moved back to the softer colors of the 1940s. After a battle with physical illness and depression, Mark Rothko committed suicide February 25, 1970.
The Rothko exhibit in the East Building is stunning. Nine works are hung in a very large room, the white walls joining with the white ceiling, providing a cozy, but expansive area for the oversized canvases. Mark Rothko was very picky about the dynamics of the viewing area for his work. He preferred to have the paintings closer to the ground than higher up, the works placed closer together than spread out, and the lighting just right. He desired his viewers to have an unforgettable time. Rothko once said, ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.’”
It is wonderful to have the National Gallery of Art so close with so many treasures within its walls. Each time I visit I find a new painting that catches my eye; that sparks my curiosity and makes me look at life a bit differently. Mark Rothko’s beautiful display did exactly that for me – awakened me to emotion in art and showed me the beauty of simple colors.