#looking for the fabulous: an account of mark rothko's voyages to europe

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Towards the end of his life, Rothko is said to have returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art almost every week to see an old friend: Rembrandt. He went specifically to see the 1660 self-portrait, to look into the eyes of someone portrayed at almost his own age, who had played a critical role in helping him find his way all those years ago. And in this quiet moment of identification, this meeting of two remarkable minds, a circle closed.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Rembrandt ֍ Self-Portrait (1660)

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The paintings that Rothko consciously correlates with his journeys were not created under the immediate impression of Italy but later. However his visits to Italy place Rothko in the position to emphasize the legitimacy of his behaviour. In a certain manner, Rothko can be compared to the seventeenth-century traveller proceeding to the sources of his art, searching for inspiration, and yet with an equally strong desire for self-affirmation.

This sense of self-affirmation is key to Rothko's work from 1950 onwards. The time that he spent in Europe established and reinforced his conception of himself as a muralist working within a tradition that he could trace back through Giotto and Fra Angelico to the painters at work in Pompeii, Tarquinia and even Lascaux. With this in mind, one can say with a certain assurance that Rothko's experience of Europe was fundamental to the development of his three greatest artistic ventures: the Seagram Murals, the Harvard Murals, and the Rothko Chapel.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Mark Rothko ֍ The Harvard Murals (1963)

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It was most likely on a visit to the Frick Collection that Rothko encountered another Old Master to whom he was drawn: Vermeer. The three paintings held there, Officer and Laughing Girl, Mistress and Maid and Girl Interrupted at her Music afforded as complete an impression of the artist's work as he could find in the United States. Convincing arguments have been made that at least two paintings by Rothko of the late 1930s have subjects lifted directly from works by Vermeer: The Art of Painting in the case of Portrait of Mary and The Geographer in the case of Untitled (Seated Man).

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Johannes Vermeer ֍ The Art of Painting (c. 1666-8)

Mark Rothko ֍ Portrait of Mary (1938-9)

Johannes Vermeer ֍ The Geographer (c. 1668-9)

Mark Rothko ֍ Untitled (seated figure in interior) (c. 1938)

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Years later Rothko referred to the Laurentian Library building as 'the somber vault', or his 'Sistine Chapel'.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Laurentian Library

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I was never able to forgive this transplantation to a land where I never felt entirely at home.

Mark Rothko ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

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Shortly after returning, Rothko accepted a new commission for a series of murals for the Holyoke Center, designed by Josep Lluis Sert, at Harvard University. Thoughts of Europe again filled his mind as he began work on the paintings in the spring of 1962, having moved to a new studio on First Avenue. Seen as a whole, the five monumental panels—a triptych and two related canvases—read almost like a colonnade from classical architecture, their lines somewhat more focused than those in the Seagram murals. The works were first displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in the spring of 1963, before being installed at Harvard in January 1964. Just a few months later Rothko received a visit at his studio from the collector and philanthropist Dominique de Menil, who proposed a commission of a series of paintings for a proposed chapel in Houston. The dream that Rothko had had in Cornwall, a dream fueled by visits to countless chapels and cathedrals across Europe over the years, was now in sight. He moved to a new, larger studio in the autumn of that year, and set about building temporary walls with the same dimensions as those at the proposed chapel. He would spend the entire year of 1965 working exclusively on the paintings, a project that he considered to be the most important of his career.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Mark Rothko ֍ Rothko Chapel

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From Rome they headed north into Tuscany, stopping in Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross in the choir of the church of San Francesco, before arriving in what was the undoubted highlight of this first trip: Florence. In the chapels of the Bardi and Peruzzi banking families in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Rothko looked at frescoes by Giotto that he had previously known only in reproduction, and he would almost certainly have seen Masaccio's emotional painting cycle in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Among the many places that he and Mell visited were two particular buildings that would have an enduring impact on Rothko's work and the decisions that he would take with it in the course of the next twenty years. The first of them was the Dominican church and convent of San Marco, with its tempera frescoes by Fra Angelico in the monks' cells (see below). He was captivated by the sourceless, evenly dispersed light that Fra Angelico achieved, which afforded the individual rooms a deeply meditative serenity. The social context and physical experience of the frescoes—intended to be seen by one single viewer at a time—were in themselves a revelation. 'When you go to Italy', Rothko later told Ben Dienes, 'you must see the Fra Angelicos'. 'He felt everything was of one piece,' said Dienes. 'The division was of one piece. That's the way he put it. You saw the wholeness of it'. Writing in the catalogue for Rothko's presentation at the Venice Biennale some years later, Sam Hunter identified this experience as the most deeply moving of that entire first trip to Europe.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Fra Angelico ֍ Christ Mocked, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Touch Me Not!, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Crucifixion, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Annunciation, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Lamentation, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Transfiguration, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Coronation of the Virgin, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

Fra Angelico ֍ Madonna and Child, San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy (c. 1436)

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From Arezzo the family travelled to Florence, rekindling Rothko's affection for a city that had left a deep impression on his first trip years earlier. He returned to the convent of San Marco to see the work of Fra Angelico, and was again moved by its austerity. As Ashton wrote:

When he was moved, he could be very thorough in exploring the causes for his emotions . . . This painter was to remain a beacon for Rothko . . . It is not a matter of 'influence' or even temperamental affinity. Fra Angelico was important to Rothko because Rothko understood the context within which he functioned, and because he himself had shifted his sights. His aesthetic was now a renunciation of self-expression in favour of meditation.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

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Rothko read everything that he could find about Rembrandt, beginning with recent monographs published by Adolph Rosenberg (1921) and David Meldrum (1923). He visited the Frick Collection, which opened in 1935, to see the four paintings by Rembrandt there, including The Polish Rider and another, slightly earlier Self-Portrait. Some of Rothko's earliest works testify to Rembrandt's influence, among them his own Self-Portrait and Family, both painted in 1936. He visited the Metropolitan's exhibition The Art of Rembrandt in the late winter of 1942, and the following year spoke about the artist's work in a radio broadcast:

The real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist's eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions—in short in the human drama. That Rembrandt expressed it by posing a sitter is irrelevant. We do not know the sitter but we are intensely aware of the drama.

When Rothko was invited to teach a course on contemporary art at Brooklyn College in the early 1950s, he determined that it should begin with Rembrandt. "Rembrandt remained one of Rothko's beacons', wrote his first biographer Dore Ashton. 'Rembrandt who knew the importance of feeling rooted in the every day world of human emotion, and yet wished to transcend it'.

Jasper Sharp ֍ "Looking for the Fabulous: An Account of Mark Rothko's Voyages to Europe." Toward Clarity (2019)

Mark Rothko ֍ Self-Portrait (1936)

Mark Rothko ֍ Family (1936)