ITP 47: Number 11/ Number 20 (Untitled), by Mark Rothko

Date: 11-03-2001
Owning Institution: Private Collection
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:       20th Century    

On 12 March 1901 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London first opened its doors to the public. To mark its imminent centenary, this week’s picture is Mark Rothko’s luminous – some might also say numinous – abstract painting, Number 11/ Number 20 (Untitled). It was last shown in London in 1961, on the occasion of the first serious retrospective of Rothko’s work in this country. In acknowledgement of the significance of that exhibition – one of a series of extremely influential shows put on by the Whitechapel’s then director Bryan Robertson to introduce the British public to the power and beauty of post-war American abstract art – the gallery has arranged to borrow the picture once more. It will go on view on 18 March as part of the Whitechapel’s hundredth anniversary celebrations.

Rothko painted the picture in 1949, when he was in his mid-thirties, at a moment when his art was in transition. Having long since abandoned the figurative styles of his earlier career, when he painted moody genre scenes and evocations of New York city life, followed by somewhat self-conscious pastiches of Surrealist art, the painter was struggling to create a new pictorial language for himself. He wanted to create abstract pictures which might aspire to the “tragic” and “timeless” qualities of the greatest Western art of the past – to recreate the pathos of Rembrandt or the sublimity of Michelangelo, but to do so in the terms of purely non-representational painting.

“I think of my pictures as dramas,” he was later to say, even going so far as to provide what he called (with his tongue no doubt slightly in his cheek) “the recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it – the formula”. This included “a clear preoccupation with death”; “Sensuality”; “Tension”; “Irony”; “Wit and Play”; as well as “Hope: 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.”

The formula was not yet perfected, however, when he created the picture reproduced here. For much of his later career, Rothko would prefer a less vertical format than this, floating large areas of colour one above the other in a way that often suggests a landscape horizon stretching to infinity. But in the late 1940s he was still experimenting with the proportion and measure of the forms in his art – as well as with their potential for creating sensation and evoking meaning. The glowing panel of subtly modulated yellow on the left of this painting invites the viewer in, as if towards an open door, through which can be glimpsed some trembling inchoate vision of pure light and colour. But the olive green panel to the right is more like a door that has been slammed shut, leaving nothing to contemplate but its flat, closed surface. The painting’s confusing title, Number 11 / Number 20 (Untitled), which reflects the artist’s creation of two different and incompatible numbering systems to identify his works, seems almost aptly provisional.

But for all its hesitancy the work does seem to contain, within it, the principal contradiction that Rothko would struggle to resolve throughout his life: on the one hand, his sense of the grand possibilities latent within abstract painting – his belief that it might be made a vehicle for self-transcendence and for the expression, even, of intimations of the infinite; but also, on the other hand, his profound doubt, his sense that his aspirations might merely be illusions, and that all he would leave behind would be dead and empty painted surfaces. Rothko’s vulnerability to depression and anxiety eventually cost him his life. He committed suicide in 1970, overdosing on barbiturates and slashing his veins, to make doubly sure of death. He appears to have felt that he was a failure, although he was nothing of the sort. Rothko created some of the most solemn and moving images of the entire twentieth century.

Bryan Robertson recently published some brief but touching reminiscences of the 1961 Rothko retrospective, recalling that the event “caused quite a sensation in London …Henry Moore made two very long visits in rapt contemplation of the paintings when the gallery was closed to the public; so did Kenneth Clark on three separate occasions. Both these men were greatly moved – Clark surprisingly so, since he had come to believe, mistakenly in my view, that totally abstract art could not really advance or develop and tended to end up as a form of decoration.”

The archives of the Whitechapel Art Gallery contain a letter from Rothko thanking Robertson for taking such trouble in the hanging of the pictures, as well as two detailed typewritten sheets of instructions headed “Suggestions from Mr Mark Rothko regarding the installation of his paintings.” These include the stipulation that all the pictures should be exhibited in relatively low light, preferably hung no more than six inches above the floor. Rothko’s “suggestions” gave rise to one or two interesting exchanges between painter and gallery director.

Robertson hung nearly all of the pictures very low, as Rothko had proposed, agreeing with the artist that this enabled the viewer “mentally to walk inside the painting and explore it”. But in the case of one picture, placed near the entrance to the gallery, Robertson hung it slightly higher “to protect the canvas from the huge cleaning machine with automatically revolving brushes which washed the gallery floor with soapy water every morning.” On the eve of the private view, Rothko insisted on lowering it fractionally. Robertson thought he was being pernickety, but as the painting was slowly lowered, one sixteenth of an inch at a time, he was surprised to notice that its principal colours and colour relationships all altered very dramatically. “It was plain that Rothko had hypersensitive knowledge of colour and light and the way they can be affected by direction and angle. At the time, it seemed revelatory.”

A greater revelation came towards the end of another day, when Robertson found himself alone in the gallery with the painter:

“The attendants had gone home, and the space was only dimly lit from Whitechapel’s top natural lighting. Coming down from the offices, the place seemed not only empty but rather dead. I made a move to turn on some lights while we exited, but Rothko stopped me. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down’. We sat down in the centre of the deserted gallery with a good view of two big paintings. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the – apparent – gloom, the deep and intense colour slowly began to appear, as if a living organism with its own life-force like a steady heartbeat or pulse. All of this must read as a somewhat trite expreience, an ordinary physical fact, of rich colour slowly asserting itself in the half-light, but I remember it with some emotion after more than 30 years as a kind of magical revelation – sitting there in the gloaming, and looking at these glowing testaments to the human spirit, floating in space in their own inner light in a silent and gradually semi-dark gallery.”