Exhibition Misses Its Mark

Encountering the early work of an artist who later became a major 20th century painter, you’re inevitably looking for clues. Could anyone have intuited in the 1930s or early 1940s that Mark Rothko would invent a radically new pictorial vocabulary?

Judging by “Mark Rothko: The Spirit of Myth, Early Paintings From the 1930s and 1940s,” at the Orange County Museum of Art, the answer is no.

But this modest exhibition of 24 early works and two later ones--drawn from the massive Rothko holdings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington--does open a window on a fertile artistic sensibility as he selects, discards and refines the stylistic and intellectual influences of his time until he strikes gold.

The two later paintings--neither, unfortunately, a major work--bracket the years of his mature abstract style.

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In the earlier (1951) of these untitled paintings, a luminous patch of salmon floats on a mustard-colored ground. By juxtaposing such soft-edged rectangles, which appear to hover on the surface of the canvas, Rothko believed he had found equivalents for what he once called “the spirit’s varied quickness and stillness.” He hoped a prolonged experience of such a painting would empower a sensitive observer to achieve his or her own transcendental experience.

The late work (which dates from shortly before his suicide in February 1970) is an unevenly saturated burst of cherry red--an anomaly at a time when Rothko worked almost exclusively in blacks, browns and grays. In hindsight, at least, this sketchy-looking painting evokes a feverish, unsettled quality distinct from Rothko’s contemplative norm.

Such untitled works were completely abstract. But even in his early figurative paintings, he was after something more mystical and darkly philosophical than his peers. Finally, during a few pivotal years in the mid- to late 1940s, he worked toward a radically new way of representing inner states.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Russia, Rothko came to the United States with his family as a 10-year-old. At 20, he was living on his own in New York, where he learned to draw and paint at the Art Students League.

During the 1930s, social realism was the dominant American style, but Rothko, a student of Max Weber, was also influenced by German Expressionism, as can be seen in the simplified heft of the figure in the earliest painting in the show, “Untitled (girl with pigtails).”

An active leftist and scrappy fighter against the conservatism of New York’s art institutions, Rothko sought a way to express the psychic states of city dwellers.

In “Subway,” from the late 1930s, reedy, severely attenuated figures press against the pillars of this underground space as if willing themselves to disappear. A man carrying a peculiarly unidentifiable object (a bird? a baby?) conjures a sense of urban mystery. This awkwardly protective figure seems to have a mythic dimension; the vulnerable creature he holds might be a surrogate for the human soul.

In Rothko’s paintings of the 1940s, overtly mythological mood pieces partly inspired by the Greco-Roman sculpture department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and by Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy,” replaced images of the urban scene. Mutated or fragmentary human figures, painted in a style mingling archaizing and Picasso-esque elements, evoke a deep revulsion with wartime society.

Other paintings combine decorative devices from antique friezes with the imagery of war (spears, banners, Roman standards). Rothko painted these tensely balanced linear constructions in a delicate, dry-brush style, with thin layers of paint seemingly scrubbed away--or eroded, as if on an ancient fresco--to reveal subtle coloration underneath.

In some paintings, the antique motifs yielded to biomorphic shapes, a Surrealist influence that facilitated Rothko’s search for a visual representation of spiritual transformation.

The vertical bands of color that crept into works of the mid-’40s (see particularly “Ceremonial,” which also contains small abstract patches of single hues) were a harbinger.

By 1947, Rothko had moved into a more personal realm: a loose-knit atmospheric assembly of abstract “multiforms,” as he called them. Though influenced by Clyfford Still, these works have a painterly delicacy that eluded his colleague. In an untitled painting from about 1948, a watery rose puzzle-piece shape and loopy patches of blue are invaded and dissolved by vaporous whiteness.

The very next year, Rothko hit on a refinement of this approach that led directly into his signature style. In “Number 11,” he stacked an irregular milky rectangle with a radiant pink center on top of thin slabs of whitened color, leaving a thin margin of orange ground.

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Because the soft color fields--which Rothko soon reduced to two and expanded to a large scale--tend to have an expansive, gaseous effect, the vertically oriented canvas creates a sense of tension. Varying the hue and surface treatment from canvas to canvas, he evoked a subtle range of moods.

The great pity about this show is its failure to adequately demonstrate what “classic Rothko” is all about. To get the buildup without the denouement leaves the viewer up in the air. For an institution that prides itself on its commitment to education, OCMA shouldn’t have let its audience down this way.

Couldn’t the museum have borrowed some major Rothkos from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles? In that way, OCMA could have improved on the 1995 showing of the same early Rothkos at the San Diego Museum of Art and made a better case for bothering to import the show so soon after its previous Southern California visit.

* “Mark Rothko: The Spirit of Myth, Early Paintings From the 1930s and 1940s,” through Sept. 7 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, children under 16 free. (714) 759-1122.