The Brooklyn Rail

As Nietzsche once said, “Only something which has no history is capable of being defined,” we ourselves anticipate history no more and no less than what Wittgenstein thought of as a constant assembling of reminders. We all remember Giorgio Vasari, who was a painter/architect, in 1550 published “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” which was regarded as the first record of artists of his day, and those who came before. Being thought of also as the father of art history, Vasari embraced a mission of memory, to save the great artists from the horror of “second death” as he wrote in the prologue:

Pondering over this matter many a time in my own mind, and recognizing, from the example not only of the ancients but of the moderns as well, that the names of very many architects, sculptors, and painters, both old and modern, together with innumerable most beautiful works wrought by them, are going on being forgotten and destroyed little by little, and in such wise, in truth, that nothing can be foretold for them but a certain and wellnigh immediate death; and wishing to defend them as much as in me lies from this second death, and to preserve them as long as may be possible in the memory of the living.

As I think of the successes and failures of artists’ legacies, I’ve learned different stories tell different life’s circumstances, depending on luck and persistent efforts on the behalf of those who are dedicating their lives to perpetually keeping the artists’ works alive and contextually relevant in the former, while in the latter what requires of the artists’ caretakers, be it members of their families, friends or colleagues there my lack of clarity of intentions or self-motivations. For I hold no judgements in either case, still, having seen both Mark Rothko, a retrospective of paintings at Fondation Louis Vuitton curated by Christopher Rothko and Suzanne Pagé (October 18, 2023–April 2, 2024), and Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper, at the National Gallery of Art curated by Adam Greenhalgh (November 19, 2023–March 31, 2024), my new reading of this American master, in part due to my recent reading of the book the artist’s son Christopher Rothko has written, Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out (Yale University Press, 2015), among other reading materials, right after our meeting in early June, 2023, I felt compelled, on these two occasions of his father’s two concurrent exhibits, to welcome Christopher to the Rail HQ in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a lengthy conversation about his own journey and the dedication he and his sister, Kate, have been able to maintain with long-lasting critical reassessment and visibility. The following is an edited version for your reading pleasure.

Phong H Bui (Rail): Before we get to discuss your commitment to your father’s legacy, I’d like to ask a few questions in regards to what shaped you as a person in your youth, leading to your own maturity. You were only six years old, and your sister Kate Rothko Prizel was nineteen when your father’s death at the age of sixty-six occurred on February 25, then followed by your mother’s own six months later on August 26, 1970, when she was only forty-eight; do you have any distinct recollection of how difficult the situation was at the time, or at the least when were you in fact aware of what had happened?

Christopher Rothko: Honestly, Kate did the hard work. None of what I’ve done could have happened without her. At the age of six, every year is huge. But of course, I do have very distinct memories of them both and of our family life. I don’t know if it was consciously, but I certainly was aware on some level that both of them were struggling during those last couple of years. So losing them in less than one year was, of course, terrible, but not a complete shock because I had been watching them deteriorate.

Rail: Without being redundant here, as most of our readers might already know how heroic and determined Kate was in her decision to sue the three executors of your father’s estate: his accountant Bernard Reis, the artist friend Theodoros Stamos whom Rothko took under his wing like a younger brother, and an anthropology professor Morton Levine, who in fact was your guardian. As you said, Kate did the heavy lifting, still it must have had a significant impact on both of you being two young orphans at the time.

Rothko: Kate really shielded me almost entirely from the legal proceedings because there was very little that I could add, but of course, I soon became aware of the case because I had an equal interest in my father’s estate. Yes, it was heartbreaking because people who were purported to be some of the closest to my father, ultimately had gotten close simply to take advantage of the estate. My father had one of the first artists foundations, and it was created by his advisors essentially to be a mechanism to defraud the estate. So, in cahoots with Marlborough Gallery, they immediately consigned the most valuable works in the estate and started selling them. If they had been even somewhat respectful of my sister and answered a few of her questions, they might have gotten away with it, but they were so dismissive of her. These days, people know her as quite sweet, but in those days, she was quite tough. She’s very smart and determined, and she decided that she didn’t like what she saw. So, it took a while to really get attorneys engaged, but it was soon enough, and we were able to bring the suit and ultimately, after many, many years, get the process stopped and miraculously get many of the paintings back.

Rail: Amazing. Despite the intensely difficult situation throughout your upbringing, you both had two respectful careers. In knowing that Kate had attended John Hopkins University School of Medicine and went on to practice clinical pathology and transfusion medicine, as well as having taught pathology, how did your interest in literature at Yale, where your father had gone to school only for two years, lead to your eventual earning of a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan?

Rothko: Many people think that I came to art as a psychologist. In fact, I think I came to psychology, because I’ve always been interested in the process of interpretation. I realized that this is actually the connective tissue between the three areas that I’ve engaged in on a semi-professional level in my life: literature, psychology, and for the last twenty-plus years or so with artwork. Whether it’s a person, or a text or a painting—all of which is about people in any case—I’ve always tried to understand both what is made on the surface, and how it relates to what’s underneath, namely our spirits, or our souls. All these processes I feel are parallel in some ways, even as I recognize aspects of beauty and art’s complexity can never completely be deciphered. Shall we say it’s a little bit of both, that quest for understanding and an appreciation for the things that go beyond our understanding. And that’s the sole reason why art exists as we know it, for it expresses the things that we wouldn’t be able to express in words, the things that we wouldn’t be able to simply analyze.

Rail: How long did you have your private practice until the calling to tend to your father’s legacy became inevitable as a full-time commitment?

Rothko: I was practicing for about eight years: half was in clinics, and the other half was in hospitals. I then had my own private practice for about five of those years, but it was always mixed with having a presence in a clinic as well. As time went on, as we started approaching the end of the second millennium, my father’s work gained a stronger presence and greater visibility. There were a lot of exhibitions in the late nineties to the early 2000s, and I was called more and more to participate. At first I was interested, and then actively involved, gradually finding myself in some ways more stimulated than I was when practicing psychology, and it took me a while to admit or to allow myself to understand this new discovery. However, right from the beginning I knew it was very important for me, as Kate did, to have my own career, my own practice, before then choosing to be the advocate, the protector, or the facilitator of my father’s legacy.

Rail: Most insightful and sensitive observers of art would generally agree that the field of psychology should never be limited to what and how certain experiences get measured under laboratory conditions; it should instead correspond to unpredictable responses, from unexpected sources, from psychological findings, or how a shape, color, movement, or expression might affect our perception, which you wrote very eloquently in your book, Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. Essentially, if the work of art is meant to be contemplated, or meant for us to return to it for multiple viewing experiences, it is as though the mirror neurons in our brain, by identifying the aura or energy of the artwork, turn themselves into our emotions, what is referred to as embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is so essential to what we bring that experience, how we remember it and identify with it. When you feel this embodied cognition, you will be able to appreciate the work even more. This is one of the conditions that I felt might have compelled you to undertake a deeper exploration of your father’s work and not take it for granted. After what Kate had accomplished, you essentially took up the baton being passed from her. My question is, what were the first steps in generating the ground of confidence, which I’m sure is based on excitement, compassion, and understanding? Is that a fair question?

Rothko: In some ways you’ve answered it, in that I think I’ve always been drawn to my father’s art, and I think the confidence came from having lived with it. Ironically, there was a very long period where it wasn’t around at all, because during the lawsuit, we had no artwork to hang. When I was first asked to participate in exhibitions, not initially with selection, but with installation and lighting, it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have real world experience. I mean, I had some experience in hanging them in my home, but I just found that it was a language that I spoke naturally. I did not feel intimidated or nervous about it, because I felt like the paintings would talk to me and let me know what they wanted. I was fortunate to work with curators who had very generous spirits and were mutually interested in having conversations about finding the best solutions for the exhibitions. They reached out to me initially without any specific agendas other than their own curiosity, or their feeling that maybe there were other inspiring paths rather than simply pursuing what they had in their own minds. As a result, I learned a great deal from those exchanges.

Rail: When was it exactly that you came to realize this new direction in your life?

Rothko: There was a useful coincidence with my move back to New York City from Michigan in 2000. I’d already stopped taking patients about a year before, because I knew the move was coming. I was doing longer term work, so I didn’t want to start with somebody and then say, sorry, I’m leaving. So without necessarily the intention, I found myself filling a lot of that time working on upcoming exhibitions: the big NGA (National Gallery of Art) exhibition, curated by Jeffrey Weiss in 1998, that then went to the Whitney and then also to Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in the following year in 1999, all of which required different configurations to accommodate to different spaces in each institution. Especially for Paris, many were lent from our family’s collection. All in all it was a great learning experience for me, as well as making lifelong friends in the process that led in the following years to exhibitions in Barcelona and Basel, at the Joan Miro Foundation, at the Beyeler Foundation, then in Tel Aviv and Rome. The next thing I knew, this was how I was spending my time, rather than trying to get licensed in New York City. As a psychologist, it is a complicated process changing state to state, as every state has different licensing requirements, and I found myself not even getting started with that process because I was busy with all these Rothko projects. This was fulfilling not simply in terms of interaction with the artwork, but was also a way to engage myself intellectually, a way to take on the interpretive process, and a great outlet for writing. I’ve always been a writer, and this was an opportunity for me to do substantial writing that required thought and research, and that was also very rewarding.

Rail: As writing has always been in your alchemy, can you describe how different kinds of writing inform one to another, from music criticism, psychological reassessments of and for your patients, to finally writing about your father’s work?

Rothko: I went to Yale as an English literature major, thinking that I would come out a writer and, somehow, that didn’t happen. When I went to graduate school in psychology at University of Michigan, I was fascinated by psychology, but I didn’t want it to be my only outlet. Luckily, I knew Ted Libbey, a magazine editor (Musical America/High Fidelity) who hired me to review five or six albums a month, which I did throughout graduate school as a part-time gig. I soon realized these different types of writing rely on one thing in common: an interpretive process that corresponds productively to how my brain works, be it listening to my patients, to music, looking at works of art, or at events of our world, everything involves human psychology ultimately.

Rail: I always loved what Dore Ashton wrote in her author’s note from her classic volume The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, “My favorite philosopher is Gaston Bachelard. I like particularly his unbonded contempt from those who, like the psychoanalyst, ‘try to explain the flower by the fertilizer.’ Knowing about an artist’s ambience does not ‘explain’ his work.” In so far as how we still admire the notion of self-creation among the artists of the NY School—with exceptions of Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb, the two native New Yorkers—most of whom were immigrants: de Kooning from the Netherlands, Gorky from Armenia, David Smith from Indiana, Motherwell from Washington State, Clyfford Still from North Dakota, Franz Kline from Pennsylvania, all of whom represent different kinds of immigrants. How would you describe your father’s own journey from Dvinsk (part of Russia Empire then, and now renamed as Daugavpils, Latvia) to the US, and how it shaped him as both the person he was and the artist you came to admire, which essentially was the basis of your book, and what I deeply felt was the son meditating and reflecting on the father’s epic journey?

Rothko: It’s absolutely a journey and everything in his history makes it unexpected. I think, as is typical of an artist, he did not fit the mold in his family, but being the youngest of four siblings, he was the most beloved. Although all three of his siblings were extremely bright and excelled in school, my father was always the one marked with a special brilliance. From a very early age, he knew he had something he wanted to say, and didn’t quite know how he was going to say it. It wasn’t until, completely by chance, a friend invited him to a life drawing class at the Art Students League, and he fell in love with it. But he really had never made art in any kind of serious way before that, he was more interested in music, theater, mathematics, and philosophy. But it was art that stimulated him intellectually while engaging another part of him that it never relinquished. It’s a synergy in him that provides his deeply emotional, spiritual side in constant dialogue with his more intellectual interests. It’s a condition that continues throughout his career, revealed in his own book The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, which was written around 1940, not a terribly long time after he decided to be an artist. You can certainly see he’s working out all his ideas, but ultimately realized he needed to work them out on the canvas, or with a brush instead. I think it pushes his artwork forward a great deal, having thought through all these ideas: What is the artist’s role in society? What does it mean to be an artist? How does an artist express the essence of their idea in a painting? You can also feel that, after having come to some conclusions about how that works, he then must take his own journey of materializing those ideas in paint. The last drafts were probably written in 1941, a full eight years before he created his classic abstraction. In some cases, you can see that the ideas are ahead of the painting, and even though he’s making beautiful paintings during this period, he’s not making paintings that express his philosophical thoughts as fully as what his classic style will do.

Rail: Do you think he may have read John Graham’s book Systems and Dialectics of Art, a book on aesthetics, which was super widely read when it was published in 1937 by his contemporaries, from Pollock and de Kooning to Gorky, among others?

Rothko: I know in later years they knew each other. But this is our frustration: for so many years, we wondered, where were all these books that he talked about, and why weren’t they anywhere in his library? In time we came to realize that he was so poor he probably either borrowed them from the library or from friends. So certainly, that’s a seminal book, which I assume he must have at least dipped into.

Rail: Let’s talk about the retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton. As I walked in the first room, I felt whatever he was searching for, it was mostly revealed in his relenting spirit of experimentation. Different senses of touch were being deployed differently in each picture, which went beyond the prevailing style of social realism of the Great Depression in New York City. What were your thoughts?

Rothko: First of all, I thought the way the room was designed in circular configuration was perfect. When you walk through the room, it’s not a passage, but rather a continuous journey, as it was for him in that period. Every painting is an experiment in how it was made with a sense of touch, as you put it, and I’d add in relation to space, which becomes the building blocks of what he’s going to do later. There are figures in virtually all these paintings, and they are occupiers of space, they are representatives of ideas, but they’re not really people—you cannot stare into their eyes or deeply into their soul and understand what it means to be them, that’s not what he’s doing there. People are part of the universe, but he’s still trying to capture the whole universe. I think even at that point he’s trying to be encyclopedic.

Rail: That makes sense. Just as those elongated figures standing in between columns in the subway, they’re in fact parts of the columns, parts of the architectural space. What about how he undertakes surrealist’s psychic automatism?

Rothko: Like each New York School painter my father had his version of how to deploy this technique, and yet he rejected surrealism philosophically. He was adopting some of the pictorial elements, but it was his obsession with Greek mythology, Shakespeare, driven in part also by reading Nietzsche, the writings of Carl Jung that drew him to the surreal. I think he knows by getting close to the essences of human society, and these archetypes that are expressed through mythologies would provide him a framework to create a universal artistic language that will touch everyone very deeply on a preconscious level, a language that continues to evolve for him. It starts rather figuratively and gets increasingly abstracted, as expressed in his statement, which ultimately seems connected to the Second World War, that he could no longer paint the figure without mutilating it. Then as he realizes the myths are too specific for him, and that he needs an even more universal language, he moves further and further into abstraction, still trying to touch these inner places in us, these mythic themes that run through all our cultures and all of our lives. Almost with each painting, you can see it happen, it keeps getting further and further abstracted until he realizes that the language of emotion—that if he can capture emotion directly in paint and in space—then ultimately that’s the language which can speak to the broadest group of people, most powerfully and most directly.

Rail: Finally, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence materialized in those classic paintings. Do you think that even though your grandfather Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist, and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz, who came from an affluent family in St. Petersburg, somehow your father was the only one who was sent to study at a Talmudic school in his youth, may unconsciously have had some effects on his pictorial thinking regarding to how in his invention of abstraction depicting the void, otherwise known as a Tsimtsum, the presence of the void, a reduction of the divine energy that created the world, or say the silence without any association of any explicit representational images, I mean those from his classic paintings?

Rothko:  The family had been secular on both sides for a few generations, but his father had this religious awakening, in part maybe as a reaction to the pogroms in the area. This is something I’ve thought about a good bit, and I do get asked fairly frequently, although you’ve reframed it differently which I appreciate, but we should understand that because he was young, the amount of time he spent in school really seriously studying text was probably not that much. Obviously, it was around him, but what I don’t believe is that he gave up the figure because of the Old Testament prohibition on making the image of God, but what I do think about is that much of the Jewish quest is trying to find and understand the Torah. Searching the void for the substance of the deity, trying to find the divine, trying to find that source of spiritual power. You could see in his work, and certainly in the Rothko Chapel, is that same quest. In the void, you are the closest you’re going to get to finding the substance. It’s a very personal journey. Religions may set parameters, they may give you guidelines, but ultimately, even if you’re the most orthodox of people, it’s a very personal journey to know your God. It’s something that is different for everyone.

Rail: As in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy many of us remember well how he postulates tragedy as being a synthesis of the Dionysian and Apollonian apogees. While Apollo is “the art of the sculptor,” Dionysus is the god of “the uneducable art of music.” As Rothko famously said, “I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry,” which was explored so beautifully in one chapter of Brian O’Doherty’s book American Masters: The Voice and The Myth (published by Random House in 1973). Do you think it was during this process of discovery, both Nietzsche and Mozart may have coincided simultaneously?

Rothko: I don’t think we know the timing. But it certainly did inform the way he thinks about music, and I do think he understands music as a very powerful Dionysian force, and, as it stirs the emotions so much, it’s both potentially a disruptive force and a tremendously creative force. So, I think he looked at music not just as a source of beauty, but as something that captures emotion in perhaps its rawest, purest form, which touches us in ways that we can’t even begin to describe. He wanted to create art that could touch us in the same way, as we see in his journey into abstraction. I think for some people, music is not such an abstract thing, because it’s a song about a specific idea, told with a narrative, but music for him was first and last instrumental music, even though he did love opera. Instrumental music is a very abstract form. I mean, it may have structure, and certainly he loved Mozart’s work because of its structure, much in the same way my father’s paintings have structure. But in terms of its contents, it’s really pure emotion. I think he found that incredibly moving and wanted to create art that had that same ability to move us.

Rail: I was talking to Michael Auping just the other day on the phone, and we both thought of Rothko’s big paintings as symphonies, with the small paintings as sonatas. We were wondering whether he listened to Mozart rather specifically when he made different scales of paintings.

Rothko: I think it surprises a lot of people when they hear that he was so obsessed with Mozart, because of course people know that Pollock painted while listening to jazz. Mozart was not necessarily the music of the moment, and I think they would have thought that he would be listening to something far more experimental, like John Cage or Morton Feldman, both of whom he knew. His affinity with Mozart’s music has to do with the deep emotional content of what lies beneath that oftentimes very simple, quiet surface. He would talk about Mozart smiling through tears. So yes, it’s sunny on one level, and then actually really listen, listen to the pain, listen to the struggle. He appreciated the structure too, as his paintings are also simple, but structured, and filled with emotional content that if you just look or listen for a moment, it’s really what infuses the whole artwork. Be it a Rothko or be it a Mozart piece, it’s what gives the work its energy.

Rail: It’s equally interesting to bring up his admiration of Miró, which can be understood through his surrealist phase, his love for Corot in the muted palette which he occasionally deployed throughout his career, then finally his natural identification with Matisse’s 1911 The Red Studio which he spent lots of time looking at; he studied it every day for months at MoMA, and later believed it was the source of all of his own abstract pictures. When you look at it, he said, “you become that color, you become totally saturated with it”; it was like music, as he eventually made a painting titled Homage to Matisse (1954). I was thinking especially of the tonal orchestration on one hand, and the symphonies of bright colors on the other hand.

Rothko:  I think Corot is not somebody whom you would immediately think of with Rothko, but Rothko colors are seldom bright. They’re saturated rather than just being bright—even the yellows and the oranges, they have a softness to them. I happen to love Corot; he’s one of my favorite painters, and you know, my father’s paintings have a deeply romantic spirit. Though Corot’s palette may be muted, there’s still this very strong sense of a romantic quest of an infinite landscape that I think is not at all foreign to a Rothko painting. As with Matisse, as brilliant as the color is in The Red Studio, it’s the form. He allows basically the form to be obliterated by the color—the color is enough to drive the form of the painting. There are just two lines that show where the floor and the wall meet, and other simple outlines for the table, chair, paintings on the wall as well as those propping against the two walls, otherwise everything is bathed in red. For Rothko, yes, it’s the color, but it’s the color as the driver of the form of the painting, and to let a painting be suffused with color is sufficient content, but also sufficient form to make a comprehensive composition. I can’t emphasize enough the inspiration he found from the boldness of an artist to completely do away with so many typical formal elements and just let color be the predominant force of the painting.

Rail: Is it adequate to propose in his pictorial thinking there is Matisse on the one hand, that perhaps constitutes his sense of joy, and then his profound reverence for Rembrandt on the other hand, that deeply relates to his own sense of tragedy? For especially in the late years of Rembrandt when only once he experienced the successive events of having lost his two wives, Saskia, Hendrickje, his son Titus, then leading to bankruptcy had he come to terms with his inner conflicts and willingly accepted the universality of his anguish. In a small painting which was shown in the Rothko room at the NGA titled Thru the Window, oil on panel measured 9 ⅞ by 6 ⅞ inches (1938/39), one can readily see how he projects his deep affinities with Rembrandt through the red canvas and easel leaning on the right wall as in Rembrandt himself facing a blank canvas with certain anxiety in his super small also oil on panel Artist in his Studio (1628) at the MFA Boston, and what is striking is on the left there appears an elongated figure cautiously walking near the edge of an opening to the below space on the floor, which I feel corresponds with Giacometti’s existential figures. Yet, the assumably self-portrait as a young boy, one can also how he is framed within the network of architectural structures, which later he was reassured by having seen Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, a vestibule space that is filled with an amazing distribution of bold yet elegant clerestory windows that were blank, devoid of light. I mean Rothko was making this similar architectural space however with varieties of light long before his 1959 “Seagram Murals”.

Rothko: Oh absolutely. He directly cites his admiration for Rembrandt in the early paintings as he anticipates his love for color through Matisse. Similarly, he’d already shown his deep interest in architectural space long before he saw Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, as you mentioned in Thru the Window, for there are windows and door frames and moldings and the figure almost gets lost in them. It’s an apparent invitation for a journey outward, except, oftentimes they are closed off, or the figures feel trapped in this space, and that suggests all these passages to elsewhere, but there’s no real sense that they are going to move on from where they are. In any case, I can only imagine that all those sources naturally transpire his “Seagram Murals” both in the sense of a formalism of architecture, and with a sense of the void, of a space you both can’t enter and is yet infinite.

Rail:  I was thinking about the notion of lightness and density. As he never gets to see the cycle of the fourteen paintings he made at his own Chapel (three walls display triptychs, while five other walls hang single paintings) installed a year after his death, I was thinking about the kind of moral clarity, the kind of absolutism that he has envisioned, for example, by pretending he has spoken to Meyer Schapiro for the reaffirmation of his desire to have the chapel to be an octagon instead of Philip Johnson’s initial square plan proposed in 1964.

Rothko: Which was included in Susan J. Barnes’ book The Rothko Chapel: An Act of Faith (1989).

Rail: Yes, and he’s able to keep this perpetual dialogue between the opposites afloat and productive. For example, while the image floats in space, we feel a tremendous gravity of tonnage. Or say bringing his quest of spiritual transcendence from the nineteenth century and the modernist void.

Rothko: True. It’s so interesting, because I used to see the chapel as something almost apart from the “easel paintings” of Rothko. But now I realize it’s the fullest expression of the quest, the quest that he was inviting the viewer onto from the beginning. There is the weight of the forms and yet they are images that seem to hover free. But there’s that constant dialogue between density and lightness, between the obscure and clarity, and I think with the chapel he distilled it much more. Talk about absolutism. He has a famous quote: “silence is so accurate”. Well, the chapel is really all about silence, and including him largely silencing his own voice. He is creating portals, which may seem shut off, and they may seem infinitely open. It depends on where you are, when you enter the chapel, because entering the chapel is a journey. But he’s creating the suggestion of a journey of self-discovery, a search for the divine; a divine outside the self, or the divine within. Again, that’s a very personal choice. He is creating that silent atmosphere for you to undertake that quest, and not much more. He really is taking his process and making it almost entirely yours.

Rail: I appreciate how you talk about continuity of feeling, continuity of meaning, and continuity of language as one simultaneous condition insofar as how each painting should be experienced independently.

Rothko:  Each painting is its own little universe, its own experience, and that experience can change with each viewing, but it’s its own self-contained space. The Chapel is a more fully realized version of that small universe of the painting. He creates a room where you’re surrounded by it, he literally creates a semi-sealed universe of Rothko, but with the understanding that maybe a whole universe of Rothko is almost overwhelming. He silences most of his own voice, and he’s with you on the journey, but he gives only the slightest direction. It’s really for you to find your own God.

Rail:  What are your insights into how he mediates scale, and whether scale is being carefully calibrated in different bodies of work in different periods of his life?

Rothko: It depends on the different periods of his career, although the intent of what he’s trying to express, it’s actually remarkably consistent from the beginning. It’s interesting, because we think of these as large paintings, but he never saw the museums of today, with ceilings of 10 meters and higher. When he was making large paintings, it completely filled the wall, and when he was younger, making smaller paintings in his small apartment, they completely filled the wall too. I think he was actually exercising that idea of taking over a space, filling your field of vision, from quite early on. But of course, the scale of the paintings, and the scale of the locations and environments where he was displaying the paintings kept getting bigger. In today’s museums, we have to think through this very carefully, because the paintings are for the most part pretty human size, sometimes a little bigger than that, and the earlier ones are of course smaller. You have a very human person-to-person interaction with these paintings. So even when museum spaces are enormous, we have to make sure that the paintings remain not an icon on the wall, but something that you can really have a direct interaction with. He was quite clear about how he wanted his work hung, and I think he really understood how their ideal expression worked. His insistence on having the paintings hung low is something that I’ve never departed from. If you’re having to look up at them, if you’re having to look over at them, you’re not really truly engaged. It has to be a direct conversation.

Rail: What are your thoughts on how color relates to light? He often said light is what he desired most, giving the context of a specific proscenium of space, from which a condition of light manifests in each canvas. Also, I was compelled by how urgently the last paintings were painted as his health was declining towards the end, like Untitled (1969) from your collection, installed on the left by the exit door of the very last room at the NGA. Its immediacy, its opacity, its haiku expression in how a large field of soft pink was painted with great ease, then the top and bottom edges were painted over as two punctuated gestures with such accuracy. I know that he was so attuned to the moment upon which he must make a statement of light and the color, be it transparent, opaque, however many layers, or not, the late paintings are at once most complex and simple at the same time.

Rothko: This observation is one I think artists understand best, for they would know what is entailed in evoking light. For him, the ultimate goal is for the light to come from within the painting. You may initially only experience it visually, but you experience it almost physically as you spend time with the painting and the light diffuses out from the painting and into you. What’s interesting is that as his career goes on, the paintings, although not exclusively, become darker. It’s not that they don’t have light anymore, it’s that the light emerges more slowly, and with a little more action on the part of the individual to find it, to extract it. What he’s really changing more than anything is the tempo of the interaction. It’s no longer something that makes you stop and say “oh, my goodness, look at the light,” but rather requires the viewer to stop and stare into the dark before he or she will gradually see the light emerging slowly. There’s no one-to-one formula. There are some light paintings at the end that, as you said, are not six different layers of color coming through from the surface, they are sometimes just one or two. But there’s something about the way that he controlled the size of the field, or bordered it with other colors, where there is still a quiet radiance that permeates the work, and if you spend the time, and absorb the color, you’ll also feel the light.

Rail:  Quiet radiance, what a great way to describe those paintings, Christopher. Quiet radiance, and slowness of meditation as one hard-won unity. My last question is, given where we are, at the height of one of the most globally chaotic social and political climates in recent history, with mainstream broadcasts, breaking news, social media feeds, and everything in-between that are dictated by the deployment of speed, were there any surprises as much as expectations you’ve discovered in these two monumental exhibits on view concurrently?

Rothko:  Again, I think it comes back to my over twenty years of direct interaction and work on behalf of the Rothko Chapel. Of course, every year feels like a crisis, and then with some perspective, you realize, well, that this is a bad year, but perhaps that year was worse. What we keep coming back to is how every year Rothko’s work feels more necessary and more relevant than ever before. At fifty plus years old, his work, especially the Chapel, feels so new and so important as a place to stop, reflect, and block out the external noise while sorting through your own internal noise. I think we see something similar with these two exhibitions, the beautiful paintings on paper exhibition in Washington DC, and the really dramatic exhibition of his paintings in Paris. People are so drawn to these exhibitions because there’s a strong need for interacting with one’s own internal life, for stopping and allowing that light or the emotionality of the work to affect them. People come and find they need to stop and reflect a little more. Contemporary society is not going to hand that to you, you have to seek it for yourself. These two exhibitions are places where you can absolutely find it—a place to contemplate and wrestle with what is truly important. If you spend the time, it’s extremely rewarding. That is what Rothko paintings continue to provide—space—physically and temporally—for the viewer to understand the import of their humanity.