Looking at Rothko

Sometime after the extended isolation of the early pandemic, I came across Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), in which two figures appear in a bright, Surrealist landscape. A lobular heart blooms in one. An eye-like, blue eddy swims in the other. They seem to be turning. All around them lines extend and taper, waver and unfurl, spiral and stellate. They are limpid, solid, opaque. A sense of the sea. I am mesmerized by the whole of it, this scene: its arcs and edges, geometries and biomorphic forms, feet and tails, intimations of the primordial and vestigial, suggesting something of the mess of life. Two figures, turning.

For a time I could count on one hand the faces I’d seen unmasked over the past year. I lived alone in the lockdown. Intimacies were occasional. Because we felt safer outdoors, the beach had become a singular respite and distraction that summer, a place to be with friends again, to swim and lie next to each other on the sand. I came to Slow Swirl in those days, returning to the reopened galleries. Even now I sometimes wait for a pause in the day to slip downstairs to see it. I like to imagine it the way the artist’s son Christopher describes it, hanging over the couch in the family’s brownstone. A painting of his parents.

I think of Mark Rothko more than halfway through his life and still beginning. Having just met his future wife, Mel of Mel Ecstatic, the painting’s alternate name. He’s still largely unrecognized as an artist, in his early forties, recently divorced from his first wife and living modestly in New York. The color field paintings are to come, still years away; they are not, in 1944, inevitable.

“I think this was actually a very joyful period for him,” says Christopher Rothko. We know, from the vantage of the future, that Mark Rothko and Mel Beistle will marry, have children, travel and argue and live together for two and a half decades, and then their partnership, too, will dissolve. Rothko will abandon the figure gradually, then entirely by the 1950s, finding a definitive visual language in abstraction, the idiom he would work in for the rest of his life.

Though I had seen images of Slow Swirl on a screen before, I was surprised by the joy that seemed to radiate from the work itself, in me. Yet something about the bright then muted colors, the fainter strokes, the nebulous pair at its center, feels unfinished. “He is really struggling to get his voice heard,” says Christopher Rothko. Now and then I try to slip away to hear it.

If we spend whole afternoons in galleries, passing through rooms where little else speaks to us, what are we listening for? What about Rothko speaks to us? Particularly in the classic abstractions, in the absence of references to the perceivable world? According to the artist, “a time came” in the aftermath of the Second World War “when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.” There is no likeness to recognize in these paintings; ideas are pared down to color. The work “is so dangerously close to nothing that it is easily rendered irrelevant when approached or presented unsympathetically; its initial grip on us can be tenuous at best,” writes the artist’s son.