Expressive power, emotional encounters: A closer look at Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds

WHAT IT IS: Brown and Blacks in Reds, a 1957 painting by American artist Mark Rothko.

This work recently sold for US$85.8 million during a record-setting evening at Sotheby’s auction house, raising vexing questions about what we mean when we talk about the value of art.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Brown and Blacks in Reds offers a sombre example of Rothko’s most immediately recognizable period, with stacked blocks of colour vibrating against an intense ground. It is usually classified as a colour field painting, part of the larger abstract-expressionist movement of the 1940s and ’50s. (Rothko himself famously disliked both these terms.)

Mad Men fans might recall a Season 2 episode in which eccentric senior partner Bert Cooper acquires a Rothko painting something like this. (“I heard it cost $10,000,” Sal says.) Some of the younger employees sneak into Cooper’s office to look at it.

Jane, who’s a practical young woman, sees it simply as “smudgy squares.” Sal, who heads the art department, is convinced the painting has an explicit message that needs to be explained. Ken isn’t so sure. “Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it,” he suggests.

Later in the episode, Cooper adds a deflating capper to the whole discussion: “That thing should double in value by next Christmas.”

If one is weighing artistic worth purely in monetary terms, a Rothko like Bert Cooper’s would have doubled many, many, many times over by 2026. In a more crucial way, though, Ken is onto what really matters.

Rothko wanted to use the expressive power of colour and scale to convey what he called the basic human emotions of “tragedy, ecstasy and doom.” Rothko doesn’t depict these feelings through visual realism. He creates them, using abstraction to bring about a physical and emotional encounter between viewer and painting.

For Rothko, reds evoke the passion and energy of life, while black suggests the finality of death. In Brown and Blacks in Reds, there is a tension between these forces.

In John Logan’s 2009 play Red, which involves an extended fictionalized conversation between Rothko and his assistant, the artist speaks of these colours in ways that reference his own troubled psyche: “One day the black will swallow the red.”

The play is set during the period shortly after Brown and Blacks in Reds was painted, when Rothko was working on a lucrative commission for the expensive, exclusive Four Seasons restaurant in New York. The two men talk about issues of creativity and commerce, about finding meaning in the face of mortality.

In the play — and in real life — Rothko ultimately withdrew from the Four Seasons commission, reportedly saying, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those prices will never look at a picture of mine.” He chose instead to donate nine of these massive works, in which dark reds, maroons and blacks predominate, to Britain’s Tate Gallery, just before he died by suicide at age 66.

Years ago, I was able to see these pieces — to experience them, as Ken would say — at the Tate Modern, where they are often on view, exhibited the way Rothko stipulated, within one enclosed room and with low lighting. Responding to each other and to the space, the paintings work together as a powerful integrated whole.

As an earnest art history student, I had read about the works, and I had a handy analytic and intellectual framework all ready. What I wasn’t prepared for was the wave of emotion that made my chest hurt and left me weeping.

I’m not alone in this response, which is sometimes called “the Rothko Effect.” In his 2001 book Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, James Elkins writes, “There is no survey to prove it, but it is likely that the majority of people who have wept over 20th-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings.”

WHY IT MATTERS: Art is often bought by the super-rich because they want to convey the idea that they value art more than money. Paradoxically, with today’s overheated art market, artworks often become the most profitable part of their portfolio. (Brown and Blacks on Reds was sold by the estate of a collector who had bought it in 2003 for US$6.7 million.)

We can’t know how the anonymous telephone buyer who acquired this painting last week values it. Is the new owner yearning for transcendence or just looking for a tax break?

I just hope there’s a little crying involved.

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