On Monday, September 27, 2010, I went to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art to see an exhibition of Rothko’s black paintings.
Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964
I peeked in, noted that there were seven looming black pieces on the walls, and for a fleeting moment felt what I imagine many people might feel when faced with this exhibition. Something within me recoiled. A wave of ennui rolled through. A sense of annoyance at perhaps being the butt of some joke about the definition of “Art.”
Most people who came in while I was there peeked in, maybe walked into the center of the room or once around its perimeter, and left. For me, a brief jolting desire to flee rose from some deep place inside, but a bigger part of me knew better and was committed to spending time with these works. I ended up staying with the paintings for over an hour. ((I would have stayed longer, but had a concert to get to later…)) In that time, one other person actually took time with the paintings.
Here is how I approach a room of Rothkos. It does take time. Go to the center of the room. Turn around slowly. Take in the effect of being surrounded by giant portals of color, or in this case, mostly lack thereof. Turn around so slowly that you see the different shapes and hues emerging from each.
Then, meet each painting individually. Begin at middle distance, normal gallery viewing range. Focus your eyes. Unfocus your eyes. In-between focus. Do this long enough that the painting shifts from being flat to having infinite depth as you start to perceive the layers and shapes in them. Notice how they disappear literally in the blink of an eye, and then re-emerge. Notice the feeling tone as the painting opens up.
Then, become intimate with the painting. I’m a rude weird ((I say it’s rude and weird because I see few other people doing it, and it means I’m obscuring the view for those people who maintain normal middle distance from the works.)) gallery attendee in that I always like to view the works as closely as possible. This is how you see the brush bristles, the cigarette butts, the finger prints, the technical details. This is how the artist first viewed the image as it emerged and when it was finished. When viewing Rothkos, this step is essential in order to experience being swallowed by the painting. With his larger paintings, your entire field of vision can be filled by color. This close encounter often magnifies or transforms the initial feeling tone of more distant viewing. This is how Rothko wanted us to view his works:
I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.
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I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.
Rothko wanted people to experience his works as he did in their creation:
I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.
It is only through this intimate, direct encounter with a Rothko that his genius can be felt. And it is felt, not conceptually, intellectually grasped or understood. Once you have experienced it and felt it, you know it: Rothko was somehow able to paint the spectrum of human psychology ((I use the term psychology in its literal meaning: knowledge or expression of the psyche, defined by Jung as “the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious” (Jung, C.G. (1971). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Def. 48 par. 797))—the conscious and the unconscious. No figures, no words, just the bare experience of psychological states.
The first time I came face-to-face with a Rothko, I was moved to tears. I got it. I experienced it. I knew what he had been up to. Later, this intuition was confirmed when I read the following: ((I also felt like less of a weirdo for crying in front of a painting of such surface simplicity and meaninglessness. Later, I read Pictures and tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings, which opens with a description of an art historian being moved to tears upon viewing one of Rothko’s black-on-black paintings and this quote, from page 3:
There is no survey to prove it, but it is likely that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings. And of all Rothko’s paintings, people have been moved most by the fourteen huge canvases he made for the chapel that now bears his name.
The seven large paintings in the exhibit currently at the National Gallery were precursors of the chapel paintings.))
I am not an abstractionist. … I am not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. … I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. … 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!
As I said, I stayed for over an hour. Yes, there were tears. I felt as though I were ripping myself out of the room when I had to leave. The black canvases had become enormous magnets, or warm stones in a stark, cold place.
Amused aside: I just now realized I only went into the first room of the exhibit. There was another room with nine more paintings. An excuse to go back?
The first Rothkos I ever spent time with were the big red ones usually on display at the National Gallery. I was sucked toward them by just a distant glimpse. So why the moment of recoil at the black paintings this time? There is much in the psyche we do not want to own. All of this is referred to in Jungian psychology as the Shadow—that in the Self which people consciously disown or disassociate themselves from, but end up unconsciously dragging around in a “long black bag.” ((Robert Bly’s phrase)) Personal growth necessitates periods of suffering, or “swamplands of the soul,” ((as per James Hollis)) which no one looks forward to. The Shadow and the Swamplands are typically associated with blackness and negativity. It is our reflex to recoil from them, as I reflexively recoiled from the paintings.
Of course, the paradox is, in Jung’s words:
…that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends
Paul Levy expands upon this:
In contrast to a light that, as the Bible says, “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,” the lumen naturae, the light of lights, is a light that the darkness intimately recognizes as its own nature. The lumen naturae is the luminosity within the darkness recognizing itself as it illumines its own darkness. This archetypal experience of the luminescence of the divine being found in the translucent darkness is referred to in various mystical traditions by names such as the luminous darkness and the black sun.
What Rothko achieved in these paintings is nothing less than representation and communication of the “archetypal experience of the luminescence of the divine being found in the translucent darkness.” He painted le soleil noir. Of course the paintings are initially repellent to the conscious ego. The work of individuation is that of spiritual alchemy and requires diving into the darkness to recover the light within. Individuation requires the death of the ego as it knew itself at the beginning of the journey. But once one has begun and seen a glimmer of the lumen naturae, one is inexorably drawn toward the darkness in which it may be found. Thus, the paintings became magnets after I truly experienced them.
I believe Rothko was working on The Opus. He called his art religious art, though he was not religious. He claimed to deal with the Spirit of Myth and was preoccupied with “finding a pictoral equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” In a radio broadcast with Adolph Gottlieb:
If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. …(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.
One week ago today, I attended a workshop with James Hollis. He cited Jung as saying The Opus requires three things: insight, courage, and endurance. Psychology can help with insight. Courage seems like an intrinsic trait which one may or may not be able to uncover in oneself. Endurance, particularly in a feel-good, instant gratification culture so inimical to The Opus, seems to be the most difficult as it must be continuously maintained in the face of our being worn down. Hollis says that we wake up every morning with two demons at the foot of our bed: fear and lethargy. To triumph over these and get out of bed is an heroic act. I know I have insight. I have confidence in my ability to muster courage. But I am prone to overwhelm and sometimes worry about my capacity for endurance. Perhaps I am projecting…
In 1967, Rothko completed the black-on-blacks. In 1968, he reduced his palette to brown, gray, and black. In 1970, he slit his wrists in his studio, overdosed on antidepressants, and died.
I believe that getting stuck in and swallowed by the nigredo stage is one of the risks of setting out on The Opus. The immensity of the Abyss can sap endurance and stifle vision. Seeing your own life against the scale of the Abyss can change your perspective on your mortality. At the workshop, an attendee asked Hollis about suicidality. In his response, he said something about it sometimes being a case of the ego choosing bodily death rather than face ego death.
I have not studied Rothko’s life or body of work in depth, and no one can really know why a person chooses to commit suicide. I only wonder what we might have seen if he was indeed stuck in the nigredo and had chosen egocide over suicide. What might he have created had he re-become himSelf? Maybe nothing. Maybe something more glorious. Can’t know.
I do know that the black paintings currently on display are products of genius, and that simply thinking about them now evokes the same feelings of wonder, awe, grief, gratitude, despair, comfort, fear, courage, smallness, strength, of being a stranger, and of being at home that I felt in the room with the canvases. All simultaneously. That is the beauty of the lumen naturae.
