Referring to the canvases called “multiforms” of 1946-47, Rothko stated: “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers.” In his vaguely figurative paintings during this period, irregular patches and semi-biomorphic forms of vibrant color float weightlessly across the picture plane. The airy shapes appear to move freely in the physically enclosed yet virtually expansive field of a canvas. They are, in Rothko’s words, “organisms with volition and passion,” moving and acting “with internal freedom.” After his vision materialized for the first time in the Rothko Room at The Phillips Collection in 1960, Rothko devoted the last decade of his life to creating a space in which the audience could participate in a tragic drama performed by pure colors of his abstractions. Rothko’s concern with drama, however, was shaped in early years of his career, even though his direct engagement with the creation of theatrical space surfaced after the late 1940s.
This paper aims to explore how Rothko’s concern with dramatic art informed his painting from the mid-1930s until the late 1960s. I pay particular attention on the ways in which the evolving modes of Rothko’s vision of theatre - both as a physical space and as a state of powerful emotion - actually shaped his pictorial practice towards abstraction.
Focusing on the implications of drama and theatre in the emotional and material conditions of Rothko’s art, I discuss how the notion and practice of theatre informed Rothko’s vision of the “intimate and human” interaction between the viewer and his painting. Critical literature on Rothko’s art has noted dramatic qualities in his paintings, but in most cases the observations and descriptions are either general or metaphorical instead of specifically analyzing them in relation to physical conditions of theatre. My goal in this paper is to show that Rothko actually engaged both drama and theatre in his art. If dramatic literature provided Rothko with a repertoire of themes and compositions for his paintings, the theatre as a place for performance and reception offered a practical model for desirable spectatorship.
As I argue in this paper, Rothko was concerned with the dramatic effect in his art throughout his career, its emotional and physical scale growing increasingly ambitious during the last two decades of his life. I trace the evolutionary trajectory from Rothko’s use of dramatic subjects and architectural sets in his painting towards his full orchestration of the physical mode of presenting and viewing his pictures. Rothko created an actual environment in which the audience was physically and emotionally enveloped by his paintings - that is, a theatre where the viewer would directly experience the “heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair,” to use Rothko’s phrase.