The format he would paint for the rest of his life

By 1953, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) had been painting the same kind of picture, with endless small variations, for four or five years, and he would go on painting it until his death. It is one of the most recognizable formats in twentieth-century art, and it is very simple to describe: two or three soft-edged rectangles of glowing color, stacked one above another, hovering against a colored ground that shows through and around them. No. 61 (Rust and Blue) is a textbook instance of it, a rust-maroon block up high, a paler band, and a deep blue-violet block below, all breathing against and within a blue field.

He did not arrive there in one step. Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in the city of Dvinsk in the Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, in Latvia), came to the United States as a child, and spent the 1930s and early 1940s painting recognizable things, city scenes, figures in subway stations, then, under the influence of the Surrealists who fled to New York during the war, strange mythic and biomorphic shapes. After the war he passed through a phase the literature calls the “multiforms”: clusters of soft, fuzzy, blotted patches of color floating against a single-hued background, with the drawn line already gone. Then he pared even those down. By 1949–50 the blots had resolved into the stacked rectangles, and the format was set.

He was one figure in a crowded postwar scene in New York (the loose group later called Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School) and he sat on its quiet, contemplative wing, about as far as you could get from the flung-paint “action painting” of Jackson Pollockat the opposite pole. What follows is his move, not the whole movement’s.

A word on the name, because three different things tangle here. Rothko mostly numbered his canvases rather than naming them; he distrusted titles as labels that told a viewer what to think. The parenthetical color tags (Rust and Blue, and the alternate Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue the museum also carries) are descriptive, after-the-fact ways of telling his many numbered, near-identical pictures apart. They are not titles he handed the work. (And because he numbered year by year, there is more than one Rothko “No. 61” floating around; this is specifically the 1953 rust-on-blue canvas now at MOCA.) The route slug here reads orange-yellow, which points at a different, brighter Rothko entirely, a 1956 picture in Buffalo. This is not that one. This is the rust and blue.

The thing that throws people first is that there is no subject. No figure, no landscape, no horizon, no object, not even a recognizable shape with a name. The whole of what is depicted is a handful of soft color slabs and the field they sit in. To a viewer trained on five centuries of painting-as-a-window (onto saints, battles, fruit, a face) this can look like a picture with the picture removed, or like decoration: a nicely colored panel for a nicely colored wall.

Rothko spent a good deal of his life insisting it was the opposite of that, and getting irritated when people missed it. He was, by every account, allergic to the idea that these were exercises in pretty color. He rejected the label “colorist.” He rejected “abstractionist.” He was no fonder of the art-historical tag that later got pinned to him, “color-field painter”; what the museums file his movement under is not how he thought of the work at all. As far as he was concerned the rectangles were not the point and the color relationships were not the point. They were a vehicle, and what they carried was raw human feeling. The format is simple, the intent is not, and the two should not be confused.