Simplify.
When I saw Rothko’s early work for the first time, it was a bit of a surprise.
Knowing nothing about him, I had always imagined him as this calm, sage-like figure, much like his iconic paintings. I had marveled at the minimalism and self-restraint of his visual language.
His early work is anything but.
A few different lightbulbs went off as I leafed through the paintings, but the most obvious one got stuck in my head and stayed there all day. Simplicity and minimalism make more sense at the end of a process rather than as a convenient starting point. Energy, emotion and content need to soak over time and over countless iterations before their minimal expression can get imbued with magic. Minimalism, in art, design, or culture — that springs fully formed out of a vacuum without the benefit of life experience—is fake, skin-deep, and kind of pointless.
Here’s a quick attempt at visualizing Rothko’s artistic journey:
Update:
Extending the timeline in both directions only accentuated the distance, in my mind, that Rothko had to travel to become Rothko.
“We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.”
From the National Gallery of Art:
In their manifesto in the New York Times Rothko and Gottlieb had written: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” By 1947 Rothko had virtually eliminated all elements of surrealism or mythic imagery from his works, and nonobjective compositions of indeterminate shapes emerged.
That last piece in monochrome is sad. It was reportedly painted just a few days before his suicide in 1969.
On a brighter note, here’s a painting from his so-called Seagram Murals, originally commissioned in the 1950s for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York. The artist was uneasy about the commission, reportedly saying:
“I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every s** of a b**** who ever eats in that room.”
