American Masterworks of Religious Painting

1664-1964

R. Peter Mooz

• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781633935068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Writers and historians have overlooked or denied the existence of a religious painting tradition in America... until now. American Masterworks of Religious Painting 1664–1964 explores 300 years of American painting and offers new revelations. Beginning with seventeenth century Puritanism and culminating in examples of intense religiosity amid twentieth century art often regarded as signifying a steady erosion of religion, each chapter offers an explosive new approach to art by America’s greatest painters based on professional scholarship. Sex, wealth, insanity and drunkenness abound but are balanced by atonement, piety, the rituals of Native Americans, and the expression of traditional beliefs, offering a new understanding of American art and artists.

MARK ROTHKO (1903-1970)

ROTHKO CHAPEL/
BLACK ON GREY

1950

Markus Rothkowitz’s whole life was about religion and precisely parallels the Jewish experience in America. He was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Latvia, then one of the most notable centers of Judaism in the world. It was the site of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Five million Jews lived in the Pale, confined there by the Russian Tsar. Some 68 synagogues thrived there. It was the home of many prominent Jewish scholars.

Markus’ father Jacob was a modestly well-off pharmacist, highly educated, and an ardent Marxist. The youngest of four, Markus was the only child sent to the Cheder, a school to train Jewish rabbis and scholars. He started there at age five. He read the Talmud and spoke Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

With war clouds overhead, the Rothkowitz family emigrated to America through Ellis Island, New York. Jacob came first and established a home in Portland, Oregon, where his brother lived. Sofia, his wife, came to Portland shortly after with her precious ten-year-old and his siblings. Ironically, Jacob died a few months after they arrived.

Sofia quickly became a cashier; Markus sold newspapers. He was enrolled in public school and skipped rapidly from third to fifth grade. He went to Lincoln High School, graduating in 1921 with honors and fluent in English. He participated in activities in the Jewish Community Center but was barred from the Lincoln debate team because they would not admit Jews.

Rothkowitz’s outstanding record in high school earned him a scholarship to Yale. Regrettably, he experienced the strong anti-Semitism that had been growing in the United States after World War I. At Yale, elitism and stuffiness compounded this. He was a voracious reader but spent much of his time reading philosophy instead of his coursework. He lost his scholarship at the end of his freshman year. For a time the next semester, he supported himself as a delivery boy but dropped out in early 1923. His Jewish religion had played a strong role in his formative years.

By October 1923, Rothkowitz moved to New York. He worked in the garment district, but soon discovered art at the Art Students’ League under Max Weber, also a Jew originally from Russia. Before coming to New York, Weber had been a member of the French avant-garde in Paris. Rothkowitz admired him and undertook art to express his emotions and religious beliefs.

Later, Rothkowitz transferred to the New York School of Design. There, his instructor and class advisor was Arshile Gorky, who was born in Armenia but lived in Russia from 1915 to 1920. Gorky achieved greatness in American painting in the 1930s when he painted a series of spectacular murals for the WPA in the Newark Airport. Even though Gorky was just one year younger than Rothkowitz and had come to America two years after he did, Rothkowitz was not so taken with Gorky. However, Gorky’s suicide in 1944 greatly affected Rothkowitz.

New York was abuzz with fine art when Rothkowitz took up painting. The Armory Show brought the European moderns, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Duchamp, and many others to New York for the first time, unleashing a period of expanding interest in art. The Eight, a group of American moderns, had been exhibited in 1908 at the Stieglitz gallery and formed the beachhead for organizing the Armory show. However, the most important effect of the 1913 show was to foster the development of professional art dealers in America. It created a market for European painters, and the Eight and their students launched into that market, too. Museums were showing Paul Klee and Georges Rouault, just to name two.

After five years absorbing this climate, Rothkowitz had a showing at the Opportunity Gallery in 1928, with good acceptance from the critics. He was painting rather dim interior scenes and cityscapes. The next year, to provide for himself, Rothkowitz took a teaching job at the Center Academy, a part of the Brooklyn Jewish Synagogue. He kept this job for the next thirty-five years. Little has been made of his time spent with young children at the center. It easy to detect some hint of his students’ crayon drawings in the expressionist works Rothkowitz did before reaching his ultimate style in 1949.

In the late 1920s, Rothkowitz met a number of rising Jewish painting stars. Among them were Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and others who formed a coterie around Milton Avery, who was also Jewish. Avery became Rothkowitz’s mentor, devoting many hours to him and encouraging the belief he could have a life as an artist. Rothkowitz felt remorse that he was not working to support his mother. He was enthralled with Avery’s abilities with color and form, which he adopted and used to begin climbing the stairs to fame and even fortune.

Nineteen thirty-two was a banner year for Rothkowitz. He met Edith Sachar, a Jewish jewelry designer who became his wife, while on a trip west with Avery. He also began arrangements for his first one-man show installed in the Portland Art Museum. Amazingly, he included works by his young students at the Center in Brooklyn in the Portland show. This is more evidence that his teaching at the Center needs more research.

Religion’s role in Rothkowitz’s work can be traced from this first show in 1933 to his last show at the Tate in London in 1969. Rothkowitz embraced a large circle of Jewish artists over the years, such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Louis Schanker, Louis Harris, Joseph Solman, and Adolph Gottlieb. They formed “the Ten” and often showed together.

Rothkowitz’s first professional works were watercolor landscapes, nudes, portraits and city scenes. He continued with the city scenes, achieving much recognition for his In the Subway of 1938. The year before, he began working in the surrealist style. Salvador Dali had come to New York then. He also did easel work for the WPA. He briefly separated from Edith in 1938. He also took out American citizenship, fearing possible sudden deportation due to the impending war.

Next, Markus Rothkowitz changed his name at the suggestion of his dealer to Mark Rothko. He dropped the “witz” to sound less Jewish, but avoided “Roth,” as that was associated with a Jewish background too.

He also abruptly changed his painting style. Part of his new style came from surrealism, part of it came from his avid reading of Freud, Jung, and especially Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Rothko felt that he wanted to expand beyond his cityscapes to more meaningful work. Religion continued to play a role in his new style between 1940 and 1943. He feared that he would become known as “a Jewish painter,” like a number of his New York colleagues. He realized he could not express his Jewish religion and sell his paintings. So he adopted mythology as his subjects. He explored Greek plays for drama, which allowed his religious ideas to be clothed in a kind of code. He painted works such as Antigone, Oedipus, and Leda, as well as Gethsemane, The Last Supper, and Lilith, which had Christian subjects. He even alluded to Egyptian art in Karnack and Syria in The Bull. His earlier surrealism gave way to figural symbolism.

This was a key episode in Mark’s life. The Last Supper, a small work at 22 by 26 inches, is unique. It was bought almost as soon as it was finished and put on public display only once, in 1943. The composition contains overlapping portrait faces above a line about halfway up which shows hands and bread, meat, and spilled wine. The background seems to be a coffered ceiling and a blank doorway, punctuating a tripartite structure vaguely like Leonardo’s Last Supper. Yet the picture does not show thirteen figures. What does this mean? The preliminary drawings for the picture show just five faces. This more properly represents the five rabbis at Bnai Brok, a meeting held the night before Moses’ exodus from Egypt. This story is part of the Passover ritual, which celebrates the liberation of the Jews. Thus, what is shown is the Jewish Passover that Christ observed before his capture, transformed into the Last Supper, featuring the transubstantiation of bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ. The piece of meat may symbolize the lamb eaten at Passover.

The scene is very clever. Mark expressed his religion in a picture disguised as a Christian event. Mark really pictorializes the escape from Egypt as a parallel to the Jew trying to escape the Holocaust in Germany. His message was that Moses tribes found their Zion after forty years, but German Jews found theirs only four years afterward in Israel, set up by the UN. Rothko’s Last Supper was hopeful and inspiring to the Jewish viewer, without having to reveal he was a Jew.

This work and others led to a Manifesto of Modern Art sent by Rothko and Gottlieb to the New York Times in 1943. The rambling document explained the virtues of painting “simple expressions of complex thoughts,” concluding with the statement that their work “must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration.” This was the prelude to Rothko’s great religious paintings done between 1964 and 1967 for a chapel commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in Houston, Texas.

On the path to Houston, Rothko went to Portland and California to recover from a final divorce from Edith. In Berkley, California, he met Clyfford Still, who was making a big name for himself. Starting at Richmond, Virginia, Still had developed a totally abstract style based on vertical color swaths, recalling landscapes. Although Rothko did not see his work until 1945 in New York, Still seems to have been the catalyst that brought Rothko to abstraction. They talked intently together and may have even discussed teaching together.

By 1946, Rothko began his three-year production of multi-forms. The multi-forms may have originated in Rothko’s watercolors that resembled an underwater universe on a background of horizontal bands. He was in contact with Still throughout this period. Of more importance was that Rothko went back to California in 1947 to teach with Still. They contemplated beginning their own new curriculum. This was realized in New York in 1948 in association with David Hare and Robert Motherwell, big names in abstract art. Their teaching lasted for less than a year, possibly due to Still’s acerbic demeanor, but became a burst of activity on the contemporary scene. It prompted Rothko to write about eliminating figures from paintings. This, combined with reading Wolfgang Paalen’s Forms and Sense in 1945 and seeing Matisse’s Red Studio in 1949 at MOMA, produced Rothko’s signature style of colored rectangles on huge vertical canvases.

Various hypotheses have been offered about the content of Rothko’s world-renowned series of color block paintings he did between 1949 and 1970. An interview with Rothko in 1949 suggests that he thought of the color blocks as portraits. The format is portrait like vertical, but Rothko cautioned, “the modern artist has . . . detached himself from appearances in Nature.” The interview concluded, “Today, the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man’s experiences is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man’s experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea.”

Another critic wrote that the “stacked boxes of complementary color set against a monochrome background and the regular form of these paintings invite association with the haunting images of mass graves.” Dark tones dominate Black on Maroon, part of a mural commissioned by Seagram’s for its restaurant, the Four Seasons. It has been described as the doorway to hell and likened to a rim of flame. These responses have obvious Holocaust resonance. Rothko’s friends secretly referred to them as “the diarrhea pictures.”

A third theory rests on Rothko’s statement that “only abstract painting could express the full gravity of religious yearnings and angst of the human condition.” This suggests Rothko desired his large paintings exhibited in smaller, isolated spaces to communicate such things to the viewer. Prominent Jewish art historian Tom L. Freudenhiem observed that Rothko “put his trust in the psyche of the sensitive viewer who is free from conventional patterns of thought. He did not know how the viewer would use the picture to meet the needs of his spirit, but he was certain that when the viewer had both needs and spirit there could be a true exchange.” The New York Times critic Robert Hughes added, “Rothko was obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meaning. One can derive the idea that Rothko may have been putting his religious tenets into the painting and because he eliminated any subject matter, communicated his beliefs to receptive viewers.”

Recent scholarship has put forth another explanation of the religious nature of the works. In a symposium at Yale in 2009, Moshe Barasch delivered a paper entitled Rothko and Kabbalah. Barbara Mann, a renowned Jewish scholar, raised the same subject in 2006 and 2011. Marc Epstein, whose artist brother was mentored by Rothko, wrote an article called Chabad to Rothko to Woodstock.

In 2012, Roy Doline published his startling book The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican. Doline’s thesis is that Michelangelo painted the ceiling according to beliefs from Kabbalah. He presents evidence that Michelangelo spread the ancient Jewish beliefs on the ceiling to avenge Pope Julius II, forcing him to plaster over the original painted ceiling to paint the present scenes when he was engaged heavily in other projects. Michelangelo spent four years on his back on a scaffold he designed and removed by himself immediately after painting the ceiling: Doline argues he did this so that the Kabbalistic details could not be easily detected. Rothko studied the ceiling carefully in 1950 when he was in Rome. Also, the Headquarters of Chabah, an organization for Jewish outreach established in the sixteenth century, was moved from Russia to Brooklyn in 1934. It was near the Brooklyn Center where Rothko taught, and Rothko could hardly have been unaware of it.

Analyzing Rothko’s work according to the teachings and beliefs of Kabbalah is a daunting task. However, Rothko’s early abstract work, Magenta, black, and green on orange, uses exactly the colors used to depict the roots of the Tree of Life that embodies the entire concept of Kabbalah. More specifically, the role of Kabbalah may unlock the eventual understanding of the Rothko Chapel.

In 1964, Mr. and Mrs. John de Menil, originally from France but multi-millionaires in oil, asked Rothko to create a chapel in a suburban area of Houston, totally how he would like it. That year Rothko took a new studio at East Sixty-Ninth Street and erected a full-scale model of the chapel he would build. He had some helpers to erect canvases with cables and scaffolds. These helpers also painted layers of colored pigments on the canvas under his intense, constant direction. Exact measurements of each canvas on the wall were recorded so the huge pictures would be placed on the chapel walls to the millimeter that Rothko used in his studio.

Consider the solo painting hanging on the south wall, usually seen by the visitor leaving the chapel. The painting is 103 by l80 inches. These mega-sized works were lifted by crane into the chapel through the dome while it was unfinished. The canvas was covered with an underpainting of alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, and certain dry pigments. Then it was c...