Dennis Hollingsworth

Smiling through Tears

I was chatting with a friend via email recently about Marc Rothko. We had seen the Pace Gallery Chelsea show Dark Palette and the conversation continued after our visit to the show:

David Cohen made a comment on FaceBook recently asking about the musical associations to Rothko's painting. A commenter dropped this link: My Father and Music: How Mark Rothko's Love of Mozart Made His Paintings Sing. All very compelling, what authority could be better than his son, Christopher?

Of course, I don't doubt for a moment that papa Rothko sported these thoughts and transmitted them to his son. But what first sprang to my thoughts was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the second movement Allegretto. I would be wrong however since Cohen's question was about the influence of a composer and not a singular bit of music.

The problem that I have is that I tend to hear Mozart as frivolous, not nearly divinely mathematical as Bach and not as convulsive as Beethoven. I'm not particularly proud of this, by the way. This is just my musical preference. For all of the "smiling through tears" claims that both the son and father make, I don't yet see the tears in Mozart... or in classicism itself for that matter. That is, unless one sees the restraint in ordering systems of the classical as a dreadful and appalling thing. I would imagine that a Marxist might see it this way -that the strata of class would be something painful to overcome. Rothko was Marxist, at least in his youth, but was this superficial or was it thorough-going?

It took the son at his word and listened with interest and attention to an example he supplied, the Divertimento for String Trio in E-Flat Major K. 563. My ears yet remained deaf to the claim! I will have to re-listen many times to try to get to ground.

If this speculation of mine is true, then why would Rothko celebrate Mozart, a composer who remained complacently within classical sonata structural form and not be a fan of Beethoven, who was quite famously violent in his manipulation of that system? Of course, aspects of the end times abstraction of the 50's drove toward the all over singular reduction of the monochrome. I have to add that I disagree with son Rothko who wrote in passing that even Beethoven was a classicist too. If Beethoven was a classicist, his famous deformations, elongations, irruptions and inversions are a fine way to love it to death.

Here is how I would work out a logic in sympathy with the claim that Rothko's Mozart is the true inspirational source of his painting: Classical architecture was a fascination that he shared with Gottileb and they were both quite literal in their early paintings together. The orders of the entablature and the decoration of the frieze is the ur-motif that initiates a schema that remained in all of Rothko's subsequent painting. Claims that his horizontal bands hearken to landscape doesn't jibe with Rothko's oeuvre. I could imagine Turner taking the logical final turn to abstraction, finally dropping all lingering figurative references and landing into Rothko territory. The indication of a horizon makes sense in this imagined scenario but I don't see it in Rothko. I see instead the formal representational of figurative decoration of the classical architectural frieze that was transformed in Rothko's painting. Figures became color. If he heard Mozart with delight (and who am I to doubt this?) then the dancing twirls of melody in Mozart can be seen in Rothko's treatment of color. It remains then that the horizontal bands would play the role of the tragic, the tears, the pain.

So a question comes a begging in my mind: what to make of increasingly somber coloration in his late work, and what was the interrelationship of this with it's partner in formal organization, the classical horizontal partitions? Was it a merging? A capitulation? Did the figures stop dancing? Once the dance of figures colors became more and more complicated, they tend toward mud, as all painters know. Life ebbing, the humus of color rotted into a darkening loam. Rothko took the final turn was toward black, the Dark Palette of his final paintings in the Pace show. Once dance become complicated, articulation is in danger of being overwritten, lost. Once lost, it is chaos. The death of a smile in tears.