Against the odds, and flying in the face of critical fashion, in any end-of-century reckoning of artistic reputations Mark Rothko stands high in the rankings. Several factors militate against his doing so: he was a painter, an abstract expressionist, and he staked everything on the spiritual content of his art. Conventional wisdom discounts the success of abstract expressionism as a piece of CIA-sponsored cultural imperialism. Fashion ordains that the lack of irony in the work of the artists associated with it identifies them as modernist dinosaurs. To mention art and spiritual in the same sentence is to invite ridicule. And anyway, isn't painting an irrelevance in the 20th century?
Yet here is Rothko, the embodiment of these variously discredited groups, practices and values and, as the German painter Gerhard Richter puts it when asked about his legacy: "I believe Rothko will be important for centuries to come." On the evidence of the substantial retrospective of his paintings that is currently showing at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, that assessment seems plausible.
Rothko's family were Russian Jewish immigrants to the US. He was born in Dvinsk in 1903, and he was just seven when, without a word of English, he found himself in America. With the support of his extended family, he gravitated towards a life in business, but restlessly diverted towards painting. He met Milton Avery and became closely involved in the circle of artists who would transform American culture over the coming decades. Throughout his career, despite exceptional critical acclaim and financial success, Rothko always felt he was misunderstood and under pressure. He was increasingly beset by health problems. Besides heart and liver trouble, he had been diagnosed as having emphysema when, early in 1970, he killed himself.
The Paris exhibition is the only showing of the retrospective on this side of the Atlantic. There are fewer paintings than were seen in the US, which is a pity, and some substitutions of works from European collections, notably the Tate Gallery. But it is still a remarkably powerful show. It spans his output from the early, faltering representational paintings of the 1930s to the final, black and grey abstracts that preceded and perhaps anticipated his death in 1970.
Rothko wouldn't agree with his painting being described as abstract. But it's used here purely as a descriptive, not an ideological term. In his eyes his work was as loaded with drama and meaning as that of the great European representational painters. Except that while they might have worked in terms of a religious iconography, he worked with expanses of colour. The end was the same.
The progression in his work vividly demonstrates that he was an artist who was singularly suited to one purpose, but was otherwise a lost soul: "that type of artist," as painter Sean Scully puts it, "who struggles until he finds his own `voice' ". When the catalogue raisonne of his paintings was published last year, it provided compelling evidence that he could never have made it as a figurative painter.
This is true even though more or less all of the qualities that distinguish his later abstracts are there in the figurative work: an air of inescapable sadness, a brilliant if highly personal colour sense and a recurrent urge to let colour speak for form. Yet the figurative compositions never look comfortable: they are fuzzy and awkward, and sometimes seem squashed unwillingly into the frame. With the wisdom of hindsight it is readily apparent, however, that many of the pieces from the 1930s almost eerily prefigure the later work.
Rothko's first experiments in escaping from straightforward representation are ham-fisted, sub-Picassoesque daubs. They gradually evolved into better, but still undistinguished attempts at surrealist-inspired compositions, featuring spindly, biomorphic forms. There was no moment of revelation. Through the latter half of the 1940s Rothko worked his way unsteadily towards the pared-down compositional scheme that was to serve him so well. The spindly forms progressively dissolved into soft-edged blocks of colour.
For a long time he evidently felt that there had to be a lot going on in a picture in terms of local incident - while simultaneously emptying ever larger areas of incident and letting the colour speak for itself. The latter impulse eventually won out, and spectacularly so. Even before 1950 he was making audaciously spare paintings featuring just a few cloudy blocks of colour contained by a border, a format that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. By then he had seen and closely studied Matisse's The Red Studio, in which the studio contents float against an all-encompassing sea of redness.
Rothko's work, with its unitary symmetries and simple, intense colour schemes, reproduces really well, and it is always fascinating to see in the flesh work that looks good on the page. Sometimes the effect can be devastating. Not here. The paintings are extremely convincing. It is particularly impressive that Rothko doesn't over-elaborate at all. There is no housekeeping in his work: no tidying and polishing, no ornamentation, nothing decorative. He paints as if he knows his Velasquez.
When you look closely at the surface of a Velasquez, what is surprising is how little there seems to be going on. He only puts in just enough pigment, just enough colour, just enough effort to do the job. Then he stops. So with Rothko. He can use garish sunset colours without ever seeming garish, or facile, or overly dramatic, because the colour is there to do a job, nothing more. Almost invariably, it's thinly, even meanly brushed. Yet stand back and it looks and feels dense, because Rothko came to excel at brushwork, laying on layer after layer of the most delicate colour glazes with big five-inch brushes.
Rothko himself claimed that he was "no colourist" and that is certainly true in the sense that, despite the obvious sensuality of his painting, he wasn't a sybaritic colourist in the way Matisse could be. He didn't explore colour for its own sake. But he had a fantastic colour sense, and his palette, from luminous, cloudy off-whites and lemons, through zingy oranges and intense reds, to sonorous plums and blacks, seems to directly reflect his purpose.
His life's work has been characterised as a gamble on the spiritual potential of his art. In 1975 Robert Rosenblum pointed out the links between the northern European romantic landscape painters and 20th-century artists including, notably, Arnold Newman and Rothko. The romantic formulation of the tiny human figure overwhelmed by the vastness of an indifferent nature is replaced by us, the viewers, standing before the shimmering void of one of Rothko's big canvases, glimpsing nothingness. The romantic sublime is supplanted by the abstract sublime and, certainly in Rothko's work, a metaphysics of presence is replaced by a metaphysics of absence.
The extent of his ambition can be gauged by two major projects: the sombre Seagram Murals - strongly represented in Paris - and the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston. The overt stage management of both is consistent with the painter's recourse to theatrical analogies, but neither the analogies nor the stage-managed presentation are necessarily in the best interests of the work. In their permanent home at London's Tate Gallery, nine of the Seagram paintings self-consciously nudge us towards transcendence.
The sacrosanct setting of the Houston paintings underlines the gravity of Rothko's purpose. He didn't balk at describing the making of his paintings as a "religious experience" that he hoped to recreate in the viewer. If we really look at his painting, the implication is, we could enter into meditative contemplation of the fundamental issues of life and death, of "tragedy, ecstasy, doom". No wonder he resisted formal interpretations of his work, and resisted identification with the colour-field painters who succeeded him. Their art of ocular sensation suggested quite another sort of transcendence. His desire to create all-encompassing environments is reasonable, but, arguably, his individual paintings are more effective and less contrived.
It's customary, and not unreasonable, to see the last, grey and black compositions as reflecting his terminal depression, a stark stand-off between death and tragedy. But they also fit logically into the pattern of his development, and they are not the inevitable end of the story. The catalogue raisonne illustrates that, by the time of his suicide, he had moved back into colour. There was still work for him to do.
Mark Rothko can be seen at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until April 18
