‘Rothko’ documentary pulls back the layers of the artist’s life
Hour-long reflection highlights ancestry, childhood, creative development and crowning achievements
Born in Dvinsk, Latvia, and raised in Portland, Ore., Markus Rothkowitz made his name as the artist Mark Rothko in New York in the mid-20th century. Yet Houston plays a formidable role in writer/director Eric Slade’s film “Rothko: Pictures Must Be Miraculous,” part of PBS’ American Masters series. His canvases commissioned for a Montrose chapel that bears his name are framed in the film as the culmination of a creative evolution.
The delicate layering of paint in Rothko’s work is analyzed in the film. Slade similarly has masterfully layered Rothko’s ancestry, his childhood, his creative development and his crowning achievements into a one-hour film. The compression of information is striking and offers a less ominous passageway into the artist’s work than James E.B. Breslin’s essential but dense biography, “Rothko: A Life.”
Twenty years have passed since Breslin’s book, years when Rothko’s standing as an artist of grand vision and execution has only grown. To wit, Slade opens with coverage from a 2012 auction of Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow.” The clip has the tension of a thriller as bidding blasts past $25 million and races toward the final price, just a shade under $87 million.
Just about any layer of Slade’s film could easily have been stretched to a feature-length film of its own: There’s an immigrant story in there; there’s a story of an artist’s arc toward a new mode of expression; there’s a tale of depression. But the bracing pace also works to the film’s advantage, almost as though Slade is urging viewers to take in the film — establish background and context — and then sit and savor Rothko’s work, which rewards long study.
The film also presents a lovingly assembled cast of talking heads. Two of Rothko’s children provide biographical perspective that pertains to his work. Actor Alfred Molina is both interviewed and filmed on stage, as he played Rothko in the play “Red.” Pretty much everything art researcher and conservation expert Carol Mancusi-Ungaro says is worth writing down. And artist Makoto Fujimura eloquently serves up perspective on Rothko’s style (“he not only painted in layers, he thought in layers”) and also his themes. “Mark Rothko painted the abyss. He wanted us to start there,” he says. But Fujimura refuses to see Rothko’s art as being full of despair. Instead, he sees hope.
Rothko’s path certainly wasn’t a clear one. Slade finds a moment of comic reflection in a New York Times review dismissing his work. Rothko’s response was brilliant: “We do not intend to defend our pictures,” he wrote. “They make their own defense.”
His health failing, Rothko took his own life before he could see the completion of the Houston landmark that held his grandest pieces. Slade includes a reading of a card Rothko wrote to John and Dominique de Menil, the philanthropists and art collectors who commissioned the work.
“The magnitude on every level of experience and meaning of the task in which you have involved me exceeds all my preconceptions,” he wrote.
“And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me. For this, I thank you.”