Rothko as Tragic Painter

Rothko as a Tragic Painter
by Justin Marquis

Walk into a room with a piece by Mark Rothko, and you are at once drawn to
it, at first it is the size, the bright colors and the apparent simplicity
of the work. The archetypical Rothko consists of a large canvas with two
predominate sections of color juxtaposed one over the other. Taking a step
closer, what from a distance appears to be a single solid mass of color
shows itself to be a depth of different washes of color, light and dark,
forming crests and waves beneath the invisible surface the eye creates. If
your first conscious reaction upon the initial encounter with a Rothko
painting is dismissive, you are not alone; if you inexplicably cannot take
your eyes off of it, you also are not alone. I had just such an experience
with my first encounter with Rothko, at once dismissive, and yet I was
captivated. Fortunately, my enthrallment allowed me to see past the
apparent simplicity of the work and into the depth of emotion in the play
and movement of color that has allowed Rothko's work to be considered the
most musical of painting.
It is well known that Rothko, and indeed Rothko wrote about how he was
influenced by the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
especially Nietzsche's early work, The Birth of Tragedy. There Nietzsche
formulated what he took to be the essence of Greek Tragedy, the combination
of the two predominate artistic forces, which he named the Dionysian and
the Apollonian. The Dionysian represented, within the realm of art, the
impulse to create music. It was the subconscious, emotive, even orgiastic
realm where individuation was lost in the primordial unity of all being.
The Apollonian impulse was responsible for the arts of representation, i.e.
painting, poetry, and sculpture. Here words and images falsified the
oneness and lack of individuation in the emotive realm of nature. Formless
impulses took on the images and words of intelligible representation and
made the human a conscious individual. Nietzsche conceived of tragedy as
the place where these two artistic impulses met. Pain and suffering
automatically fell under the domain of the Dionysian as a subconscious non-
individual emotion and drive, but were caused, in part, by the traumatic
process of Apollonian individuation. Through tragedy, the music of pain
was given representational form in the narrative poetry of Greek theatre;
it was made dreamlike, visible and intelligible. This allowed the Greeks
to experience and rejoice in both sides of their existence, the oneness of
all of nature and the beautiful and painful reality of individuation.
Tragedy was for Nietzsche (and according to him for the Greeks) "the
fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception
of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope
that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored
oneness."[1]
Rothko saw himself as creating a Greek tragedy on canvas. He too, like
Nietzsche's Greeks, did not see tragedy as negative, but rather he saw it
as affirmative of life, both in its primordial and innocent unity and its
painful and intelligible individuation. In the place of the tonality of
music, Rothko created his own tonality of color made visible on a canvas.
He wished to have said of his painting what Nietzsche said of the Dionysian
art of music, that it "is distinguished from all the other arts that it is
not a copy of phenomenon or, more accurately, of the adequate objectivity
of the will, but an immediate copy of the will itself."[2] The dance of
colors is the rise and fall of the intensities of the emotions (both
conscious and subconscious) made visible, made Apollonian.
What is evident in Nietzsche's early writing on tragedy is the extreme
optimism that such tragic art would be able to "justify existence," as he
put it, even in all of its misery and pain. While he never wholly
abandoned his view that a tragic art could raise a culture above the
ignoble and the base, he also ceased to believe that existence was
something that could, let alone needed to be, justified. Existence came to
be, for Nietzsche, something that stood outside all possible evaluations,
either affirmative or negative, because it is the condition for the very
possibility of every evaluation. With existence standing without need or
possibility of justification, its extreme, radical innocence did not need
an art to somehow falsify its ugliness into beauty. Art is no longer
needed as a justification, but is rather a creation done out of an
affirmation inside everything that exists, an affirmation of everything
that can be affirmed, an active creation.
This new sense of creative art becomes a synthesis of the Dionysian and the
Apollonian, and in his later work Nietzsche simply refers to it as the
Dionysian. Two things are important about the Dionysian: Firstly, it is
the complete affirmation of everything that is necessary in things.
Nietzsche uses the image of the dice throw to show that everything is both
a product of chance and necessity, the necessity of chance. For Nietzsche
the Dionysian impulse revels and dances in this fate and radically affirms
all of it, whether it is suffering or happiness. Nietzsche's tragic
character, Zarathustra, makes this aspect of the Dionysian a central motif
of his teaching, "A new will I teach men: to will this way which men have
walked blindly, and to affirm it."[3] Secondly, the Dionysian is the
representation of the fact that the world is unrepresentable, and as such
is a paradox. Nietzsche discovered that the world, far from being the
intelligible, visible world governed by natural laws that we see everyday,
is actually a subconscious plurality of forces. "Facts [are] precisely
what there is not, only interpretations… It is our needs that interpret the
world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust
to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the
other drives to accept as a norm."[4] Dionysus is the name of affirmation
given by Nietzsche to the play of the multiplicity forces and drives that
make up the world. That gives every apparent fact a multitude of possible
perspectives and therefore an infinite number of interpretations, making
every experience of reality a necessarily creative one.
Mark Rothko's paintings are his Dionysus. Nietzsche attempted to make
intelligible the unintelligible through words on a page. Rothko attempted
to do the same thing, to make visible the radically invisible, through
plays and intensities of color on the canvas. Unlike traditional painting,
which attempted to represent things in the world by creating a visible
likeness of them with line and color, Rothko's work makes no attempt at
representation or likeness. Instead of creating an image in the viewer,
his paintings create new emotions and impulses; they push the viewer from
one intensive state to another. This revolution in the artist's intention
in the painting brings into question traditional categorizations of
different types of art. Rothko's work is labeled in these traditional
categories as "abstract", but given the Nietzschean understanding of his
paintings that I am suggesting, this label is particularly inept.
Paintings such as those of Rothko at the height of his artistic career are
often called "abstract" because they do not represent a concrete object,
i.e. they are not of or in the likeness of something. Perhaps a better
label for Rothko's paintings would be "concrete," and representational
painting, i.e. painting in the likeness of an existent object, would be
better labeled as "abstract," abstract because the painting is not the
object, but rather an abstraction of the object being visibly represented.
Rothko's paintings are concrete because in their nonrepresentational form
they themselves become concrete objects (a canvas with pigment), creating
rising and falling emotional intensive states in the viewer. Art ceases to
be a passive re-creation of the world and becomes an active creation within
the world and its subterranean movement of drives and forces.
Rothko's painting, with their layers and undulations of color and light,
illuminate that the world, which we often perceive as populated with solid,
static objects is really a world of constant change and becoming, a world
in which forces push and beat against one another. The static, unchanging
solid object is an illusion; it is impermanence and conflict that are real.
Nietzsche describes this world as

force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time
one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea
of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally
flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood
of its forms… This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And
you yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides![5]

When Nietzsche says that the world is will to power he does not mean that
the world desires power or that the world has conscious desires at all,
rather he means that the world (and everything in the world) is an
interplay of dynamic impulsive forces and relations of power. To
understand what this means, consider a mountain. In our common, everyday
mode of thought, the mountain is a permanent, immobile rocky object, but
from a Nietzschean perspective this way of perceiving the mountain is
incomplete and misleading. The mountain is really a whole interplay of
forces that push dirt and rock up toward the sky as giant, mobile plates on
the earth's crust crush into one another, and the mountain is also the
forces of wind, rain, and snow that erode it into level earth. Each
individual thing or object is the dynamic continuum of processes that
create and destroy. The Nietzschean secret is that being is becoming; this
is precisely the meaning of will to power. Rothko's paintings illuminate
this way of understanding the world, not because of the image they produce,
but because of the effect they have on the viewer. A Rothko painting is
not a static piece hanging on a gallery wall; it is the interaction between
the eye and the canvas, the flux of emotional states within the viewer.
Thus a Rothko painting is not an isolated, discreet object situated in the
world like a goldfish in a bowl; it is an integral part of the whole. The
painting does not stay on the gallery wall. If the viewer is at all
affected, if he or she goes out into the world changed by the experience,
consciously or not, then the painting goes with her. Rothko's work is born
out of the blending of the two great artistic impulses, the desire to
create images and the desire to feel intensely, creating a tragedy of
color, a tragedy that affirms existence through both tears and laughter.

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[1] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 10.
[2] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 16.
[3] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Afterworldly." Emphasis
mine.
[4] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 481.
[5] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1067.