Chapter 1 Roots (1903-1913)
“What lies before you
reminds you of your own image; what lies behind you reminds you
of your lost visage.”
Edmond Jabès
A Jew and a Russian
From the very first--you might say almost from
his birth in Czarist Russia on, September 25, 1903--Marcus Rothkowitz
(his original name) experienced the confusion of being a Russian
and a Jew. Emigrating to America simply added another level of
complexity to an identity problem that went back to his earliest
childhood.
All his life he took pride in his Russian birth.
He enjoyed speaking his two mother tongues, Russian and Yiddish,
and possessed a Dostoievskian nostalgia, a melancholy longing,
for the bitter-sweet pleasures of sorrowful rêverie. The powerful
radiance, the golds and reds of his abstract paintings, are expressions
of the Oriental side of his nature. They transpose the naïve mystical
energies of images and icons remembered from childhood. Of course,
what Rothko retained in his later years was not the religious
iconography but the aura of sacredness that haloed his memories
of iconic art. There’s a striking similarity between the flat
compositions of Russian religious art and the flat planes of his
his abstract canvases (which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a purely
strategic element in the way he used planes to build his compositions--a
technique that allowed him abolish illusionism).
The quintessentially avant-garde New York artist
that Rothko was to become would be constantly confronted with
contradictions arising from his divided origin. He was a Jew born
in an anti-Semitic nation, and on top of that he was a Russian
transplanted to a pragmatic country swept by modernism. He became
an American citizen in 1938. Twenty-one years later he had his
name legally changed to Mark Rothko.
His cultural horizons were thus unusually broad.
He was a Russian, a Jew, and an American, and he spoke four languages--Russian,
Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. Such multicultural layerings are
the lot of most emigrants, but they are not always as enriching
as they seem to have been for Rothko. […]
Dvinsk
Dvinsk is located on the banks of the river Dvina
in Lithuania, not far from Chagall’s birthplace, Vitebsk. At the
beginning of the twentieth century most of the Russian empire’s
five million Jews lived in the region around Dvinsk. Dvinsk itself
was a relatively important city, numbering some 100,000 inhabitants,
about half of whom were Jewish. The Jews had their own district,
with their own businesses and services. A busy railroad junction,
Dvinsk was a thriving industrial center and had a huge military
fort with a garrison of 25,000 soldiers. With a large working
class population and a high proportion of poor, it seethed with
radical politics, both Jewish and Russian. Social democrats, revolutionaries,
Zionists, and Bund militants were all active in Dvinsk, which
had the reputation of being a hotbed of subversion.
The government became increasingly alarmed at
the situation there. In 1904 the army and police brutally broke
up a mass demonstration protesting the pogroms that were taking
place in other parts of Russia. A climate of terrorism and repression
was ushered in, marked by espionage, counterespionage, assassinations,
and arbitrary arrests. After the abortive uprising of 1905 the
Czarist secret police tightened its watch on suspected revolutionary
activists. Jews were their favorite target, as well as that of
the Cossack horsemen, who were used as an instrument of state
terror. The year Marcus was born the Jews of Kishinev were butchered
in a bloody three-day pogrom, and similar atrocities occurred
in other Russian cities.
Czarist Russia was violently anti-Semitic. There
were laws restricting Jews from traveling. Jews were obliged to
live in what were in effect Jewish townships--ghettoes. All but
a small minority were denied higher education. By and large, the
Dvinsk Jews were better off than their brothers and sisters elsewhere
in Russia; at least they were spared the worst forms of persecution
taking place in other Russian ghettoes. Nevertheless the peace
they enjoyed was a very relative one. Early in 1905, in response
to yet another mass demonstration, the city was placed under martial
law and Cossack troops were given a virtual license to gallop
through the ghetto, brandishing whips, sabers, and revolvers and
generally terrorizing the inhabitants.
The persecution of Russia’s Jews worsened in the
years between 1906 and 1911. There were more pogroms, partly in
response to nationalist Russian agitators who openly proclaimed
that Jews must be destroyed and the motherland saved.
Early Memories
The collective fear fostered by this climate of
violence seems to have made a profound impression on young Rothko.
Years later he told visitors to his New York studio that he recalled
being held in the arms of his mother--or perhaps a nurse--as a
Cossack swung at them with his whip. Pointing to the scar on his
nose, he would state that he had received it on this occasion.
He claimed to remember seeing Jews digging their own graves in
a wood before being executed by their captors--though he wasn’t
sure he’d actually witnessed the killing.
Some of Rothko’s acquaintances have cast doubts
on these memories and have suggested that he invented or reconstructed
them from stories he’d heard as a child. His brother Moses mentions
punitive expeditions by Cossack troops and says that Dvinsk Jews
lived in a constant state of fear, but bas no memory of his baby
brother being whipped or of seeing any mass Jewish graves. Ultimately
it makes little difference whether Rothko’s memories were true
or invented. What matters is that they indicate a remarkable propensity
for dramatization on the part of a deeply emotional nature. They
show that Rothko’s personal dynamic needed to appropriate the
tragedy of anti-Semitic persection--a tragedy that underlies his
entire work. […]
Family Images
The paintings that express the emotional subject-matter
and themes of Rothko’s Russian childhood have a fascination all
of their own. A number of his figurative works refer directly
to the domestic and affective background of those first years.
Consider the Portrait of Rothko’s mother. Anna
is getting on in years; her face is rather plump, her features
somewhat coarse. The lighting is bleak, as if to underline the
fact that there’s not much tenderness in her looks, but a certain
stiffness; a heavy, densely physical quality; a plump, rather
expressionless mask. Something about her thick features and the
shape of her nose reminds us of Rothko’s own face. The striking
thing about this early painting is the fact that the artist’s
method is already clearly visible. He’s concentrating on “the
single human figure--alone in a moment of utter immobility.”
The distinctly Expressionist Woman Sewing (1934)
depicts what is obviously another mother figure. Here the summarily
sketched silhouette is faceless. We have the same range of brown,
gray-green, dark ocher tones as in the previous picture. It covers
the walls, table and seamstress, with an added contrast from the
black contours and the few bright splashes of color. The mood
of this canvas appears to be made heavier by the cloistered air
of the woman bent over her joyless task.
There’s more warmth and spontaneity in the 1930
Family. The baby--the infant Marcus?--sprawls nakedly on his mother’s
breasts, idly stroking his father’s (or older brothers?) cheek.
It’s a rare picture of happiness, of sheer physical contentment--almost
the only one that Rothko ever painted. Notice the circular composition
(another rarity), suggesting a kind of cocooning-within-an-intimate-space.
Very different is the ambiguous, rather unsettling
Two Women Holding a Child by the Hand (1937). The child looks
like he’s being protected and at the same time guarded like a
prisoner. The disproportionately large head of the woman on the
right (a device borrowed from De Chirico as well as children’s
art) gives her a weirdly hydrocephalic look, accentuating the
strangeness of an impersonal, emotionally blank human figure.
The disturbing effect of these two women--really, a two-fold mother
figure--is further sharpened by the contrapuntal presence of the
two mannequins in the background. This is clearly a child’s vision,
a telescoping of past and present, inner reality and outer world.
The scene is a street in America, and one senses that Rothko projected
both his own angst on it and the angst of the modern world into
which he was brutally thrust as the child of emigrants. […]
In the end, the quest for Rothko’s roots leads
us inevitably to ponder over time and death. Even as he was shaping
his personality as an artist, he was forever trying to break away
from limits. Painting his own subjectivity purely and simply never
interested him. “In my paintings I don’t express myself,” he once said. “I express my non-self.”
Early on, suffering taught him the virtue of being
a mirror--in other words, of opening his eyes to the universal.