In the early 1940s, Mark Rothko wrote a manuscript called The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, and left it aside, unfinished. After he died in 1970 it was edited by his son Christopher, who published it in 2004. Rothko’s central contention in the manuscript was that philosophy and painting share the objective of trying to express reality as a whole or in a generalised form. Where the philosopher describes reality in language, the painter presents it in sensual experience.
Rothko went on to visualise and express the sensual character of reality in his late series of abstract expressionist paintings in the 1950s and 60s. He wanted, he wrote, to present “the unity of the ultimate by reducing all phenomena to the terms of the sensual.” He did this by intuiting a sense of the interconnection the things of the world have with each other by virtue of their shared existence. And he painted their interconnection by subsuming figurative shapes and physical distinctions in swathes or bands of colour. His open-ended colour fields are often described as floating or hovering, and they are instilled with ineffable life. Viewers who immerse themselves in their surfaces speak of having an experience of transcendence. How might this experience of transcendence be understood philosophically?
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Perception and transcendence
In The Visible and the Invisible, his final and unfinished work, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his earlier phenomenology of sense perception into the broader abstraction of a unifying metaphysics. And there is a correspondence between his metaphysics of sense perception and the transcendence experienced in Rothko’s paintings.
For Merleau-Ponty, we are connected to the world through the channels of the body’s senses. The senses are the primary means through which we are open to engaging with the world and exploring it, especially through the sense of sight. Rothko’s paintings, too, are based in our bodily or biological orientation towards the world. For him, the outward thrust of the body “involves a process of procreation, the extension of oneself into the world of the perceptible environment.” Art arises out of this bodily extension into the world as “the fulfilment of the biological necessity for self-expression.” As such, art is “a species of nature”.
The very opening out of the body into the perceptible world is, for Merleau-Ponty, a movement of transcendence. It is “a distancing, a transcendence” in which “I go from myself unto it, I go out of myself into it.” Transcendence is inherent in the movement of sense perception whereby sight, in particular, explores what is visible by way of the appearance of things stretching out in space one behind the other into infinity. According to Merleau-Ponty, things “are always behind what I see of them, as horizons, and what we call visibility is this very transcendence.”
Along with their differences and diversity, writes Merleau-Ponty, things appear as a whole or a unity: “Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, ‘exterior’, foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are ‘simultaneity’ …” He uses the term “Being” for the unity that all things have existing together in the moment. Being also refers to the awareness of reality in its broadest and deepest sense. As he puts it, “Being envelops the beings”. We are bound up in the world through particular, limited, intentional relationships of one kind or another with things or beings, but also have an awareness of the world existing overall as an unlimited whole or Being.
In his book From Phenomenology to Metaphysics, Remy Kwant described how for Merleau-Ponty our specific intentional relationships with things are “situated within a more fundamental unity, viz., the unity of Being.” Being, Kwant wrote, is what “co-appears in all phenomena and makes phenomena possible.” Where our intentional relationships are fickle and vary according to stimuli and circumstances, Being remains an abiding presence. But unlike the knowledge that comes from whatever is attended to directly in an intentional subject-object relationship, we can never know what Being is directly. This is because Being is not an object as such. It is, as Kwant pointed out, “the ‘quasi-object’ of lateral awareness.”
Painting visibility
For Merleau-Ponty, “what is proper to the visible is … to be the surface of an inexhaustible depth”; and Rothko said of his paintings that they are either “expansive and push outwards in all directions or contract and rush inwards.” In their energised open fields of diffuse colour and light, the paintings show both the fathomless depth of visibility’s expanse and its density. In doing so they give off a sense of all-pervasive presence, of a metaphysical reality arising from sense perception.
Rothko emphasised that he wanted his paintings to surround the viewer and feel “very intimate and human”. He wanted to immerse the viewer in them in the way we are immersed in visibility. To contribute to this effect, he painted on large canvases and left them unframed, often continuing to paint on the canvas around the edges of the stretcher-board. He also wanted the viewer to look further through them as though looking through dematerialised gallery walls. His intention was to defeat or dissolve the sense of confinement that comes from gallery and museum walls and allow the experience of the paintings to project beyond them.
To help draw attention into the spread of visibility in the paintings he chose not to give them specific descriptive titles to indicate how they should be viewed. Instead, apart from the suite of paintings that became known as “The Seagram Murals”, the paintings are labelled “Untitled”, or by their colours, such as “Untitled (Red)” from 1956 in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The absence of specific descriptive titles draws attention towards immersion in a painting as a whole, rather than settling in a focus on a particular aspect. It is as if Rothko aimed to paint the ineluctable medium of visibility itself, in which the particularities it displays have been dissolved into a fabric of modulated light.
In Rothko: The Works on Canvas, David Anfam describes how we look through a surface “as though it concealed veiled radiances and depths” — the more absorbed we become, the more the radiances and depths reveal themselves. The deployment of light is central to expressing radiant depth. What Rothko called “the plastic use of light” is suffused throughout the canvases in varying shades and strengths, and is “the instrument” of a painting’s unity. He composed the paintings from layers of under-painting energised with a light that seems to emerge from the depths onto the surface and extend into the distance in a seamless spread of presence. For Anfam:
Ghostly planes are arrayed or superimposed in a plenum that blurs the demarcations of internal space: some appear to project outward as if lit from underneath, others akin to an occlusion that falls from outside the image.
The deployment of light in this way catches, in an abstracted or distilled form, the texture and passage of ordinary perceptual experience in which we focus in on some particular thing, while, from the margins, some other facet, or some other object, draws our attention. As visibility is porous in opening out, so are the paintings. We see through them into an indefinite beyond. The paintings tell little that is explicit compared to paintings that depict biblical scenes or sublime features in nature. But for Rothko, “There is more power in telling little than in telling all”, and he could see how “the accuracy of silence” is a kindred response to what cannot ultimately be explained. Yet there is in the paintings a sense of unfolding towards something revelatory. In an essay for the 2008-9 exhibition of Rothko’s late series at the Tate Modern, Achim Borchardt-Hume describes the paintings as conveying “the drama between physical reality and its transcendence”.
In some of the paintings there are emblematic images of vertical columns standing alone, or of a pair upholding a crossbeam, as in the Seagram Mural “Red on Maroon” from 1959 in the Tate Gallery. Located in the foreground, the images serve as a threshold or site marker from which to look further into the backdrop of colour as if into the space-time continuum. Some of them summon up comparison with the ruins of a temple entrance from a lost civilization. They evoke a sense of human presence in an ancient terrain. In David Anfam’s piece for the Catalogue of the 2008-9 exhibition at the Tate Modern, he noted how they bring to mind the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Space Odyssey. They have the aura of a man-made feature from a distant epoch, or a memorial left behind by long-departed planetary visitors. They radiate as touchstones from sites where arcane talismanic rituals might once have been performed in response to the strangeness of the world. The nature of the rituals has long been lost, but their atmosphere still lingers, giving a sense of human presence in a temporal and spatial world.
Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” evokes something of a similar aura of human presence in a landscape as the Rothko paintings that contain columns. A pair of well-worn old leather boots evoke a human figure who has toiled in fields under a large sky and wide horizons, a peasant who drove a horse-plough and sowed seeds and harvested potatoes for the table. In “On the Origin of a Work of Art”, Martin Heidegger described the boots as immersed in a pervasive sense of their presence in the world, evoking something of existence itself, or of Being. The boots are subsumed in Being as the deeper and broader dimension out of which they appear. “In the work of art … some particular being, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its Being. The Being of beings comes into the steadiness of its shining.”
Rothko’s ethical sensibility
Rothko is unlikely to have known about the correspondence between his understanding of art as the sensual display of perceptual reality as a whole and Merleau-Ponty’s description of transcendence occurring in the ordinary movement of sense perception. The Visible and the Invisible was first published in English in 1968, a mere two years before Rothko’s death. But Existentialism was a strong cultural current throughout the 1950s and 60s when Rothko worked on his series. And he was interested in philosophy. In his “Introduction” to The Artist’s Reality, Rothko’s son Christopher mentions that his father’s paintings were “philosophically driven” and that he read contemporary philosophy and literature.
In an address to the Pratt Institute in 1958, Rothko spoke of his high regard for Kierkegaard’s seminal text, Fear and Trembling. He could see in Kierkegaard’s personal and passionate account of anxiety about making choices, as well as the singular leap into religious faith outside of institutional frameworks, a projection towards transcendence in individual life. It is a projection Rothko associated with the vocation of the individual artist who aspires to produce something felt to be eternal.
Accessing reality through emotion is the hallmark of existentialist philosophy. And in The Artist’s Reality, Rothko writes of his affinity with Nietzsche’s insight in The Birth of Tragedy on the role that universal human emotions of insecurity and tragedy had in giving rise to the art of classical Greece. Rothko, too, understood art as a means of transcending suffering by making it meaningful. He believed that those emotions which come from insecurity and lack of power bind people in common more strongly than others, and he sought to ensure that his abstract paintings were rooted in such basic emotions as “pain, frustration, and fear of death.” Rothko’s engagement with emotions that stem from human vulnerability led him to see his paintings having an ultimately ethical purpose. He regarded ethics as also the aim of philosophy. He wrote that in the end philosophy is about “improving man’s conduct”. Similarly, paintings can help us to behave in “a relationship of harmony” through their expression of an inherently connected diversity laid out in a sensual unity.
This does not mean that art, in and through its aesthetic unity, should be unifying in any morally didactic or sentimental sense. Art has to find a creative way to express the unadorned reality of experience, not make-believe, while expressing what is of human value. As Rothko put it, “The whole problem in art is how to establish human values in this specific civilization.” For him, “The church remains as a symbol of the need and the desire for … ultimate unity.” Similarly, “myth represents the dissatisfaction with partial and specialized truths and the desire to immerse ourselves within the felicity of an all-inclusive unity.”
Mythical stories about the gods in Greek antiquity reflect the capricious forces in external and human nature. They provide for some understanding or order over and against the recognition of chaos, the abyss, or the infinite unknown. But each generation of artists has to find its own way of expressing reality in the light of the ideas and circumstances of its time. And, in laying bare our human presence to the world, Rothko’s paintings expose, for his time, the value of that presence in the light of it being both precious and threatened. The 1950s and 60s were decades in which there was fear of the Armageddon of nuclear war and concern about ecological fragility. Since then, concern about the existential damage being done to the planet by human activity has increased exponentially, and the nuclear threat remains from the continuation of international conflicts. It is relatively easy to see now how both are reflected in Rothko’s paintings from those decades. Also, an air of force and foreboding comes from some of the “Black on Maroon” paintings, in which bands of black have a striking shock effect. And perhaps something of the twentieth century’s nadir of horrific events that occurred in Rothko’s lifetime, Stalin’s pogroms and the Holocaust, seeped into the paintings’ sombre atmosphere.
At the same time, many of the paintings provide an uplifting experience of both spiritual and moral meaning. For Charles Taylor, art’s sense of unity or wholeness emits an ethical charge. In Sources of the Self, he writes of the experience of “energies or forces” that pervade, and exceed, our intentional relationshipto particular things. As with the understanding of Being as a quasi-object of lateral awareness, energies and forces cannot be present as a direct object of knowledge. They are beyond specific description in language. We are in a “non-expressive” relation to them. But they can be felt to exist, especially through the power of art, where they are made “translucent”. They are felt as “something deeper”, as “a spiritually significant fullness or wholeness”. Taylor calls this felt experience “an epiphany” where we are moved or affected in some kind of transference of meaning or understanding felt to be both enlightening and enriching. Included in this epiphanic transference, for Taylor, is an ultimate source for our for moral sensibility: “Realizing an epiphany is a paradigm case of what I have called recovering contact with a moral source”; the epiphany “becomes the crucial locus for what I have been calling moral sources.”
Seeing in the dark
The understanding of transcendence and ethical sensibility as underlying currents in the perceptual experience brings the traditional identification of their source down from the heights of an independently existing God to a human level. In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty wrote, “Transcendence no longer hangs over man; strangely, man becomes its privileged bearer.” It is an understanding that stops short of positing the experience of transcendence as evidence of the existence of an independent God. At the same time, it remains open to the domain of the unknown that could include God’s existence as independent.
For Remy Kwant, the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of a metaphysical dimension to sense perception is that it opens a way to believe in God’s existence. As Kwant put it, “with contingency failing as the final truth of philosophy the foundation of Merleau-Ponty’s atheism disappears.” This is not to say that an experience of Being in any sense demonstrates the existence of God. But it is an open-ended experience that gives ground for believing in the existence of a hidden God. Merleau-Ponty seems to allude to this in a somewhat obscure, exploratory passage:
We are interrogating our experience precisely in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves. This does not even exclude the possibility that we find in our experience a movement towards what could not in any event be present to us in the original and whose irremediable absence would thus count among our originating experiences.
There is a strong sense in Rothko’s paintings of something of this lived existential experience of both openness to things and also to some originating source that is irremediably absent. He was aware the transcendent dimension in his paintings could be experienced as religious as well as secular. “If people want sacred experiences they will find them here. If they want profane experiences they’ll find them too.” What Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s metaphysics describe, and Rothko’s paintings show, is that the transcendent realm is neither dichotomous with this world nor otherworldly. The source for spiritual meaning and expression is in sense perception as the most fundamental condition of presence to the world.
The late series include large “Black-Form” paintings, 14 of which surround the viewer in an octagonal, skylight-lit room in the made-for-purpose “Rothko Chapel” in Houston, Texas. They can give an initial impression of being little more than opaque black surfaces. But as the eye travels into them light is seen to emanate from their darkness. Faintly-gradated lesser shades of slate and ashen grey and purplish inflections and far-off fleck of haze give grip to their deepening depth and sense of something numinous. In an essay to accompany the 2008-9 Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern, Achim Borchardt-Hume has written of these paintings that “Rothko’s searching gaze spoke of his unwavering belief in art’s potential to convey transcendental truths.” And many visitors to the Rothko Chapel of different faiths and none have testified to their experience of this spiritual dimension.
Rothko’s final works from the late 1960s, a series of “Brown and Gray” paintings and “Black on Gray paintings” are closed in on themselves and hard to penetrate. An atmosphere of fading afterglow comes from them and perhaps his personal circumstances were an influence — Rothko suffered from heart trouble and depression and ended his own life. But, paradoxically, the “Brown and Gray” paintings can seem to bring a transcendent depth into sharper focus by pushing its obscurity right up against the viewer through the two contrasting, yet contiguous, blocks of colour, one above of the other. As Briony Fer wrote of “Untitled (Brown and Gray)” in her essay for the 2008-9 Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern: “If there is nothing much here, it is an extraordinarily palpable void.” For her, the paintings show Rothko as “more a materialist and less spiritual than is often thought.” Yet she could see the paintings “examine with an almost anatomical precision the thin and sometimes barely perceptible border between materiality and immateriality.” Their very closeness to a meaningless bleakness seems to clear the way for a sense of the spiritual to emanate from them.
In the “Black on Gray paintings”, above the rim of a desolate grey-white segment of what looks like the Arctic circle, lies the dark backdrop of space. The density of the cosmic blackness condenses awareness of depth almost to the point of making it impenetrable, an effect strengthened by a stark white strip around the edges which gives the pictures a sharp photographic look. Yet the eye is still drawn beneath the surface into intensified darkness. There is a sense of visibility falling away, attenuated to a remaining frail inherence in cosmic darkness that has religious or quasi-religious undertones. There is in them something of what Pascal called “the infinities” of space and time that precede, and will exceed, a person’s brief span on earth, and whose silence terrified him as he weighed up whether to believe in God’s existence or not.
Manus Charleton is a former lecturer at the Institute of Technology Sligo, where he taught ethics and politics. He is the author of Ethics for Social Care in Ireland: Philosophy and Practice. His writing has been published in Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, Dublin Review of Books, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, and on Brainstorm, a website of Irish Radio and Television (RTÉ).