Christopher Rothko came to the Baltimore Museum of Art on March 27, to present a lecture on the art and writings of his famous father, Mark Rothko. While he is a psychologist by training and profession, Rothko spoke intimately about his father's artwork. During his lecture to a full auditorium, Rothko, who edited a recently published book of his father's philosophical writings, expounded on the parallels between Mark Rothko's earlier, figurative works and later abstract paintings in the context of Rothko's writings.
To the listener who was familiar with Mark Rothko's works, the lecture, on the surface, was a presentation of little new material. The fact that Rothko's earlier works foreshadow the strict horizontal alignment of his late abstract works is a point much belabored by scholars and professors, and while Rothko did talk about the visual cues of Mark Rothko's development, the son used it as a jumping-off point to explain and expand the philosophical ideas of the father's writings.
At one point in the lecture, Rothko read an excerpt of his father's writings, comparing abstract art to abstract math, where the letters of an equation encompass the "sphere of generality" while an equation with specific numbers relates to one particular situation, eliminating any sense of the philosophical. In a similar vein, Rothko used two of his father's works to create a parallel between abstract and concrete math and abstract and figurative painting. Just as the letters of the abstract equation represent the universal and the philosophical, so do the abstract rectangles of his later paintings. As a correlation, when specific numbers replace the general equation, essentially eliminating the universal component of math, the movement and manipulation of color and shape into the figurative takes away the universal aspect of abstract art, instead replacing it with the specific and literal.
It is particularly interesting that Christopher Rothko would use Mark Rothko's works to visualize his father's writings for two reasons. First, Rothko makes it clear that while he was editing his father's manuscript, it was evident that Mark never mentioned himself as an artist, precluding his art from the focus of the narrative. When read on its own, one would think that Mark Rothko intended to write a treatise on the state of abstract art as a whole. While that may certainly be part of the case, when looking at the abstracted emotional rectangles of his later art and the quasi-Surrealist art of the 1940s and early 1950s, one with the benefit of eternal hindsight can see his writings as a way for Rothko to figure out the differences between figurative and abstract art in order to move his own art from the representative to the transcendental.
The omission of Rothko's profession in his philosophical writings also reflects the adamant denial by Rothko to explain the meaning of his work, especially the later abstract works. Honoring his father's wishes, Christopher Rothko left the actual content and emotion for the viewers to discover.
