Mark Rothko and the Jewish battle for soul of modern art

“He’d be physically ill. I don’t mean come down with a cold or something like that. He’d be throwing up, just completely torn apart, physically as well as mentally.”

According to James Brooks, who had a studio in the same building in the Bowery as the artist, Rothko told him that the “reason for his deep melancholy” was that “his work had reached such an acceptance that it now inhabited the investment world as much as or more than the art world… Now he no longer felt his work was admired for itself, but that it was a rising commodity quotation on the stock market.”

Over the next two years, the exhibition toured Europe and appeared in almost every major city, starting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Rothko sent meticulous instructions on how his work should be hung. The gallery walls, he said, should be “considerably off-white with umber and warmed by a little red” and “the larger pictures should all be hung as close to the floor as possible,” except for the Seagram murals which should be hung as they were painted, four-and-a-half feet from the floor. He added that the “light, whether natural or artificial, should not be too strong,” as “the pictures have their own inner light and if there is too much light, the colour in the picture is washed out and a distortion of their look occurs. The ideal situation would be to hang them in a normally lit room — that is the way they were painted... They should either be lighted from a great distance or indirectly by casting lights at the ceiling of the floor. Above all, every picture should be evenly lighted and not strongly.”

Bryan Robertson, then director of the Whitechapel, recalled: “He asked me to switch all the lights off, everywhere; and suddenly, Rothko’s colour made its own light: the effect, once the retina had adjusted itself, was unforgettable, smouldering and blazing and glowing softly from the walls — colour in darkness.”

The Whitechapel was a hugely influential gallery at the time.

As the art critic Jonathan Jones wrote 40 years later in The Guardian: “Almost all the most influential modern art exhibitions in post-war Britain happened here: Jackson Pollock’s first British show in 1958, Mark Rothko’s in 1961, Robert Rauschenberg’s retrospective in 1964. Most famous was 1956’s This Is Tomorrow, which explored architecture, technology, sci-fi and consumerism.”

Rothko’s show at the Whitechapel was a huge critical success. The Observer praised “this brooding, tragic quality hanging over the paintings.” The Evening Standard wrote of “the sincerity and beauty of Rothko’s paintings.” The best review by far, though, was by David Sylvester in The New Statesman (20 October 1961), one of the two great art critics in Britain at the time. “These paintings … are the complete fulfilment of Van Gogh’s notion of using colour to convey man’s passions.

“They are the realisation of what abstract artists have dreamed for 50 years of doing — making painting as inherently expressive as music.” Rothko wrote to Sylvester to thank him. “What is satisfying to me in putting on a show like this is that at least one person rose to the heights to which the pictures aspire.”

The timing of the exhibition was perfect. The Rothko show had an astonishing impact and helped make him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, up there with his fellow American Jackson Pollock, not just as a famous artist but as the symbol of post-war modern art.

The American Century at last had its own famous artists. What Bellow, Miller and Roth were to post-war American literature, Pollock and Rothko were to its new art.

New York, not Paris, was now where the action was. As Clement Greenberg, America’s leading post-war art critic, wrote: “the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the centre of gravity of industrial production and political power.”

There was something else that was particularly striking about this new American art: so many of the great post-war American artists (and art critics) were Jews or immigrants.

Rothko, a Jew from the Russian Pale; Barnett Newman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland; Adolph Gottlieb, born in New York, the son of Jewish parents; Arshile Gorky from Armenia, who had escaped the Armenian genocide as a child; Willem de Kooning, born in the Netherlands.

The irony was that these great Jewish and émigré abstract artists displaced the Jewish figurative artists on both sides of the Atlantic, in particular, immigrant and refugee artists such as Raphael Soyer and Philip Guston in America, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, Eva Frankfurther, Martin Bloch and Josef Herman in Britain.

Abstraction, first the Abstract Expressionists and then Colour Field artists such as Rothko, dominated the 1950s and ‘60s.

In one of the best books on art during those years, James Hyman wrote of “the ferocity” of “The Battle for Realism”. Careers were ruined.

Figurative artists were no longer fashionable. Abstract artists, such as Rothko, became world-famous, their paintings selling for huge sums. The exhibition at the Whitechapel, 60 years ago this month, was a crucial turning-point in this battle, not just for Rothko, but for a whole generation of Jewish artists.