(Above: Woman. Rothko. Guard. Fondation Louis Vuitton. April 2, 2024 All of the photographs are from the ones I took the day I attended the show.)
I arrived in Paris on Easter Sunday and on Tuesday I attended the Rothko show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton on its last day. There were two crowds there. One in the rooms and one on the walls. Indeed, it finally became for me more a curatorial feat for I kept thinking about all the procuring and processing and organizing and arranging and convincing and conniving and dealmaking and seducing and with it all temporally tethered together with the institutional finesse as integral to such undertakings by such places as the wealth that wakes them into being. I thought about all that more than I finally thought about the art which was not edited to teach us about the work and career or even presented to us in such a way to make us think but to overwhelm us with its dark insistence of its durability, its greatness, which I guess was appropriate since Rothko's own insistence of it stemmed from a kind of angry self-doubt and resentment that his insistence wasn't so readily accepted.
(Above: In the first room of the exhibition that showcased his early work from the 1930s.)
(Above: Another early work.)
(Above: another early work.)
Rothko agreed with a critic who called his work "serenity ready to explode.” The work does vibrate with import but it, for me, lacks joy which is an odd thing to observe about an artist who is quoted in the show as saying, "I'm not interested in color. It's light I'm after." But the color was more interested in him than the light was. That was the conundrum in which his art was the crux. I sensed the razor blade in his hand as much as the paint brush in so many of these canvases. In some way they appear bled into their being before he bled himself into his not. There is nothing abstract about the expression of that.
(Above: A work from 1944. Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea.)
He was a really bad figurative artist in the 1930s - George Grosz having a nightmare that he was channeling Chagall, or maybe the other way around - and yet the only thing greater than how bad he was (well, okay in my estimation) was his need, his calling to be an artist. It seemed to be a fevered impulse to create, which I guess all artists who believe themselves to be artists must have within them. I am thankful he found, after coughing up some Kandinsky and clearing his throat of it, his visual voice that was all about that need for that light in the needier acknowledgment of color in which he was able to stack a stoicism on the canvas, embed it there, when he more deeply needed it in his life where it failed him. I think he painted the way he did because it was the only way he could and thus be able to call himself an artist since he so longed for others to call him that too. And yet it was alas almost decorative. I think he must have known it. That was both his dare and his daring: he deemed it so himself before he dove in deeper. I kept coming back to that one word: insistence. The work insists. Its power lies in its not knowing what it is insisting but existing anyway in the insistence. I think the not knowing finally killed him. He was after the light but he never caught it and it is that lack of stillness - the frustration of seeing light as the chased prey and not a chastened form of prayer - in these canvases that appear to be all about stillness that could at times stun me when I wasn't numbed by them, the crux of another conundrum of his work.
(Above: One of the myriad canvases that manifests a kind of stacked stoicism of color)
(Above: More stacked stoicism.)
And then - after all that - I got to the Tate and Seagrams rooms. The one self-harmonizing note he found over and over and over began to vibrate with a higher lone harmony. Its insistence became finally sensitized. I surrendered. I wish he had in some higher way as well himself. The art did. And we are left with that. And his suicide. These canvases that create the vibrancy of contemplation when confronted are not dead, but there is death in them
.(Above: A woman confronting a canvas, each contemplating the other.)
An odd critique