Expressing Passion for a Painter : Art: Biographer James Breslin fell in love with the abstract style of Mark Rothko, he tells a Laguna Art Museum audience.

During the eight years that UC Berkeley English professor James E. B. Breslin toiled over the research and writing of the first biography of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, people were always asking him why he was doing it.

Actually, as Breslin explained dryly during a lecture Wednesday night at the Laguna Art Museum, people asked him three questions: Why are you writing it? Why are you writing a biography (as opposed to, say, an art historical monograph)? And why are you writing about Rothko instead of Jackson Pollock or Frank Sinatra?

Breslin, whose “Mark Rothko” was published by University of Chicago Press last year, explained that his passion for Rothko dates back to a winter day in 1979 when he happened to drop into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where the brooding painter famous for his floating rectangles of color from the 1950s and ‘60s was having a posthumous retrospective.

“I fell in love with the kind of paintings Rothko began in 1949 and continued for the next 20 years,” Breslin recalled. “I was swept up by these commanding paintings, with their spirituality, sensuality, emotional charge and aggressive edge. They were tremendously beautiful, but not merely beautiful. They made abstract painting come alive to me as a language.”

But why, Breslin wondered, did Rothko--who was 46 in 1949--suddenly begin to paint the rectangles after 25 years of being a relatively minor painter? (Rothko had worked in figurative styles and an abstract linear fashion similar to that of fellow Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky before developing the scattered, soft-edged shapes of color that immediately preceded the rectangles.)

For some art historians, reasons for Rothko’s major stylistic shift can be found in the spirit of a particular time and place--New York City in the ‘40s--where a group of artists were searching for a newly powerful, distinctly American way of making their mark on canvas.

But Breslin, who is not an art historian, said he sought the answer at the point where “life and painting might coincide.” The advantage of a biography, he noted, is that it can accommodate social, psychological and economic questions (such as the effect of the burgeoning art market during the 1950s and ‘60s on Rothko’s production) as well as strictly artistic issues.

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Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in the Russian town of Dvinsk in 1903, two years before the czar’s soldiers brutally repressed a local demonstration against the anti-Jewish pogroms in other cities. When he was a sickly child of 7, his father immigrated alone to the United States. Two years later, his older brothers followed the father and a year after that, the rest of the family was united in Portland, Ore.

On the one hand, leaving Russia meant more freedom and security, Breslin said. But on the other hand, the child was removed from his home, his school, his street, his language, culture--even his climate. Meanwhile, his father had fallen ill. Six months after 10-year-old Rothko came to the United States, his father died.

“What did this succession of losses mean to Rothko?,” Breslin asked. Even though the artist-to-be was part of a huge wave of immigrants, “Rothko experienced his emigration as an event unique to him,” Breslin said. “He resisted assimilation, as if he wished to pursue what he had left. . . . It was as if he assumed that he could best hold himself together by holding himself apart.”

Pursuing this approach, Breslin quoted Rothko’s remark about viewing his art as “unknown adventures in an unknown space--a journey toward freedom.” Breslin even remarked on the absence of people, places and objects in Rothko’s paintings of the ‘50s and ‘60s as indicative of “solitude” and “loss,” even though other artists (presumably carrying different biographical baggage) also had abandoned those elements.

Breslin described Rothko as “physically restless” with a “ravenous appetite” for food and alcohol and a need for “companionship from men, consolation from women and adulation from both.” He was “very eager for (his paintings) to be loved--in exactly the way he wanted.” As the poet Stanley Kunitz remarked to Breslin, Rothko had “a great vacuum at the center of his being.”

Breslin dwelt on the death of Rothko’s mother in 1948 as a direct influence on the rectangles that began to appear in the paintings the following year, though he also proposed several other sources for the change in imagery, including Rothko’s close friendship with painter Clyfford Still and the increasing use of abstraction by other painters of the time.

“But why the rectangle?,” someone in the audience asked.

Some of the rectangles are “grave-like,” Breslin replied. The death of Rothko’s mother was both a “liberating” and “melancholy” experience. “I think (the paintings) are about mourning. They turn despair into this beautiful transcendence.”