The new edition of The Artist’s Reality, Mark Rothko’s revered book on artistic practice and philosophy, features an afterword written for this occasion by artist and award-winning author Makoto Fujimura, whose own book, Art and Faith, has attracted much critical acclaim. Fujimura’s essay, entitled “Mark Rothko, A Painter of Ideas,” reflects on Rothko’s writings and the transcendent capacity of Rothko’s paintings to express pure ideas. He looks, too, at the significance of the decade-long gap between The Artist’s Reality and Rothko’s mature paintings, during which the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb were unleashed upon the world.
Makoto Fujimura—
I have always been, as far as I can remember, an artist. But it’s entirely possible that I would not believe in the possibility of a painting manifested as a pure idea were it not for Mark Rothko. As his son, Christopher, notes in the introduction to The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, “Rothko was explicitly a painter of ideas.” Etymologically, the word idea originates from the Greek idein, “to see.” Thus, when a person understands an idea, that person says, “I see.”
Remarkably, Rothko had seen these ideas in the early 1940s—at least ten years before he mastered his iconic style of painting. Rothko’s essays in The Artist’s Reality are pedagogical writings, partly prepared for art lectures at the Brooklyn Jewish Center Academy. Yet his thoughts are generative and ambitious, moving far beyond the teaching of children. Just like Van Gogh’s letters, these are unintended epistles, revealing a thinker of supreme breadth, one who brings together history, philosophy, and culture to clash and coalesce toward a new reality for the future generations. Though at the time of their writing the artist was not painting with the self-assurance he achieved in his later work, nor had the world come to recognize his importance, Rothko’s words exude confidence. And they could be said to constitute some of the last epistles of Rothko; he would later become reluctant to write about his paintings.
Rothko’s ideation and inclinations could have been easily, and typically, left undeveloped, surrendered to the ordinary demands of survival. But here we see the artist’s tenacity—an obstinate refusal to give up his ideals in painting, thinking, and writing. We peek into his heart, and each word is a declaration of a determined search for pure essence, as if he could push back the temporal needs for survival. These writings appear as an unexpected lifeboat in the midst of the art world’s dark, shark-infested waters, a lifeboat that, since their first publication fifteen years ago, has taken in countless art world refugees like myself.
Rothko’s writings invite a young artist to consider the pure art of idein—art as a gift, and not a commodity. He was interested only in truth, or “future births of truth.” We can see how, and why, Rothko returned the $35,000 check for the Seagram commission. The return of that check—a rejection of the opulence represented by the Four Seasons—was for him a necessary sacrifice. According to Christopher, the check was more than Rothko had earned from all the paintings sold up to that time in his career combined. Yet its return injected purity and spiritual unction into the modern art world. This unction of mythic scale birthed all of Rothko’s breakthrough projects, such as the Rothko Room at Tate Britain (which holds the Seagram commission) and the Rothko Chapel (made possible by Catholic philanthropists—the de Menil family in Houston). That these seminal works found a home just days before the artist ended his own life only adds to the sense of tragedy and kenosis, or self-emptying, in his life, however complicated and imperfect he might have been. The essence of Rothko’s art, then, becomes a pure gift to the world, rather than mere commodity.
To me, as a Japanese American, the gap between the writings in this volume and Rothko’s mature paintings presents a pregnant question. Here we read about the artist moving away from figures into what would become luminous squares. In that gap, for me, is a traumatic black hole in which I am forced to reckon with the atomic glow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rothko has not, as far as I know, spoken of the atomic bombs, the rubble of churches (the Nagasaki bomb detonated over a church as a special mass took place), the evaporated bodies showered with beads of stained glass. But as I look at a mature Rothko painting, I am forced to consider the lingering impact of these fallen cities on my identity, as surely as Rothko must have considered the ripples of the Holocaust upon his own.
Dore Ashton in About Rothko (1983) discusses Rothko’s thought process surrounding these paintings:
Rothko’s thoughts on the Kierkegaard interpretation of the Old Testament story went something like this: Kierkegaard is describing the artist . . . The artist—that is, Rothko—is compelled to sacrifice, to commit a unique act, as all artists must, even if it comes into conflict with the universal law. Behind this interpretation lay the tacit hope of retrieval, even redemption.
Rothko’s writings are a map navigating the complicated puzzle of postwar paradigm, filled with notes from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, and the book of Job, pointing to this “tacit hope of retrieval” beyond the waste land and our ground-zero realities. Then what was Rothko’s sacrifice in conflict with the universal law that leads to redemption?
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Rothko’s thoughts on the Kierkegaard interpretation of the Old Testament story went something like this: Kierkegaard is describing the artist . . . The artist—that is, Rothko—is compelled to sacrifice, to commit a unique act, as all artists must, even if it comes into conflict with the universal law. Behind this interpretation lay the tacit hope of retrieval, even redemption.
Rothko’s writings are a map navigating the complicated puzzle of postwar paradigm, filled with notes from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, and the book of Job, pointing to this “tacit hope of retrieval” beyond the waste land and our ground-zero realities. Then what was Rothko’s sacrifice in conflict with the universal law that leads to redemption?
I stand in the Rothko Room at Tate Britain, in front of the monumental painting Red on Maroon. Unlike the others in the room, this painting is horizontal, and contains no “window frames” painted with darker tones, as in his other works there. The surface is not just monochromatic but spatially expansive. As I spend time in the dim light, thoughts begin to percolate on the surface of the painting.
As a painter, I know about layers, and Red on Maroon captures layers of paint delightfully. But my dominant thought in response to this masterpiece is not of layers but of sacrifice. This is a work of what I call “essentiation,” rather than abstraction. In order to find the essence, a journey away from self-expression, there is sacrifice.
I say to an accompanying friend, a pastor, “That red painting is about sacrifice. . . . What would happen if we had the sacrament of Eucharist in the midst of it?” I do not mean that these paintings created a religious realm, and therefore the room should be turned into a Christian church: I meant that these paintings themselves are eucharistic, Rothko’s pursuit of artistic purity as a sacrifice of self, a rejection of the insistence on “self-expression.” That sacrifice, a journey up the Mount Moriah of Isaac and Abraham that Rothko frequents in his mental gymnastics with Kierkegaard, is a sacrifice toward a possibility of redemption. Rothko’s Red on Maroon offers a tear-filled sacrifice, but as a redemptive portal, toward a feast at the edge of the abyss.
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Rothko’s art invites one to write, as I do here. His art, severely limiting direct descriptive elements, and thereby wordless, yet invokes a world in which the air is full of words and verbose injunctions. Of course Rothko himself, as the Broadway production Red depicts, was very driven by argumentative, midrashing words. But here again, paradoxically, as with all things Rothko, at the same time his art depicts, and invites, Zen silence.
Rothko’s art makes one believe; to him, his painting is faith. It is a type of work that transcends the medium, while fully immersed in the materiality and the potential of paint. But as Thomas Crow notes, there are no idols here (No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art, 2017). Instead of melting gold to create a golden calf, Rothko’s works create a modern, ecumenical tabernacle (and therefore a chapel). When Rothko speaks of the “plastic journey” in these writings, he means not synthetic polymer but a journey of expansiveness, of transcendence. Rothko’s art gives birth to my own generative “mineral journey” of mixing pigments by hand and “Nihonga journey” of a Japanese painting method requiring patience to create slow art. Remarkably, Rothko writes: “When you see a plastic one, you seek amongst those that you know something like it, for it is a new creation.” Rothko’s writings anticipate my writings on “Theology of Making,” or “Theology of New Creation.”
In using a unique mixture of pure pigments with Magna paint, hide glue, and other binders, Rothko achieved a purity that is not a conceptualist’s purity but rather the beauty and immanence of pure materials. This faith in the purity of materials has become a starting point for my recent works as well. I realize now as well that writings can be as connected, intricate, and integrated as paintings. Educating the next generation is not disconnected from brushstrokes either; in these writings, categories begin to collapse.
Rothko, I am convinced, would have loved Nihonga materials and the Japanese notion of beauty; it is quite appropriate that part of the Seagram commission is now in a major collection of the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan. The Japanese kanji ideogram for “beauty” is 美, composed of two ideograms, 羊 (sheep) and 大 (great). This ideogram flowed down through the Silk Road cultures. At first, in China, apparently it meant a fat sheep, to celebrate in a fall banquet. But in Japan the concept evolved to possess a deeper meaning: a sheep as sacrifice, and beauty connected with death. Philosophers and artists have noted the idea in Japan of beauty as a great sacrifice. In this view Rothko’s works, especially the red paintings, are a portal into the New, but through this Japanese understanding of beauty and sacrifice.
To stand in front of a Rothko is to consider the possibility that when the material and the somatic are fully experienced, that is precisely when the spirit manifests to our senses, and such experience can sanctify our perception. In that moment of personal archaeology at the edge of the abyss, as we excavate and study the self with our tears, we are brought into the heart of tragic myths. The materiality of the paint is where the spirit can dwell, invoking the eucharistic in Rothko’s silence.
Such art as a gift to the world is the manifestation of the word idein, or of the idea to be made seen. Rothko’s writings anticipate such an incarnation, hidden but manifested, a portal into a New Creation.
From The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, Second edition. By Mark Rothko, edited by Christopher Rothko, and with an afterword by Makoto Fujimura. Published by Yale University Press in 2023.
Makoto Fujimura is an artist, an award-winning author, and the recipient of the 2023 Kuyper Prize. His books include Art and Faith: A Theology of Making.
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