Art deep dive: Rothko’s emotive colour field paintings, rooted in Greek mythology

Mark Rothko is arguably one of the most accomplished colourists of Modern art and a pioneer of American Abstract Expressionism. Both however, are opinions he strongly refuted. Rothko’s primary focus was to convey and to stir in the viewer the most powerful of emotions.

In the early 1940s, Rothko along with his American peers were still looking to Europe’s Surrealists for their theories, ideologies, and aesthetics, yet to break into their own Modernist explorations. Rothko at this time was also greatly influenced by the work of the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900), particularly ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, which was published in 1872.

In ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche explores the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to culture, particularly the use of both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Where the Apollonian represents order, beauty, and rationality, the Dionysian represents passion, ecstasy and the unconscious. Nietzsche’s theory was that when combined, these two forces produced the highest forms of art. 

It was these two dynamic ends of the human psyche that Rothko was determined to convey. Removing any suggestion of the figurative form or landscape, he began to purely focus on representing these immense emotions through colour.

Later becoming known as his multiforms, the paintings that Rothko produced in the mid-1940s were a crucial step towards his celebrated colour field paintings. Concerned with the relationship between space, colour, and scale, it was in these exploratory works that he found his unique visual language.

From 1949 until his death in 1970, Rothko created a staggering 836 colour field paintings. For this extensive collection of works, the artist devised his own technique for the ground, pigment, and application, which he guarded so closely that not even his studio assistants knew of his method.

The incredibly thin, translucent layers were built up slowly to create the glowing, vibrant effect and interplay between colours. His use of both hard edges, and soft, dispersing layers also add to the emotiveness of his work. Colour was merely an instrument to Rothko, in his pursuit to elicit a response equal to that of a Greek Tragedy, or religious experience.