Arts and Letters

Mark Rothko and I had a very friendly acquaintanceship, based on a mutual admiration for each other's work (I consider him one of the two or three most important painters of the twentieth century and often find one of his works more moving than anyone else's) and based also on a curious high regard for seemingly disparate qualities in each other's natures.

Although we had met before, our contact really began when Mark wrote to me in 1949 from Italy where he had gone with his wife on a fellowship—I believe a Prix de Rome. It was the end of his sojourn abroad (he detested Europe), his wife was pregnant, and he possessed only return tickets home and two hundred dollars. I was heading the art department of a small college in New Jersey, and he wondered if I had a possible teaching job for him to come back to. I was unable to help him at that moment, much as I wished to. Nevertheless, we saw each other from time to time after his return, and he always invited me—sometimes it seemed to me with some urgency—to visit him in his studio. As the years passed and each of us became busier and more successful, and I moved out of the city, this also never came to pass.

Nevertheless, he continued to invite me whenever we met, and the sense of urgency grew in the last few years, particularly after both of us became involved in commissions for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building. Whenever we met, we would discuss our progress on this work. His difficulties with relating to our client and to the use of the room are well known. Yet his natural response to the elegance and sobriety of that magnificent interior stimulated him to the production of a series of paintings which were and are considered among his greatest achievements, even by himself. Nonetheless, before they were completed, he withdrew them from possible use in the space for which he conceived them. (This is consistent with his general attitude toward the public display of his work. Toward the end he demanded that his paintings be seen in special "chapels," to be viewed by specially selected viewers.) Toward me he exhibited considerable admiration for my seeming ability to enjoy involvement with the "outside" world and its uninhibiting effect on my creative process, and it was specifically this "ability" which he wanted to discuss with me in his studio. I confess to some sense of guilt about my never having done this for him either; yet I realize that two things precluded it.

First of all, his attitudes surely stemmed from a deep sense of defense against what seemed to him a hostile world, and my lack of seeming concern for worldly hostility could not have altered his nature; I have no formulae. Secondly, my own reaction to his attitude was as unrealistically admiring as his toward me. I often wished that I had the ability to devote myself so totally to the children of my imagination, and to divorce myself from the "deceits" of the world, from which I nevertheless seem to draw sustenance for my imagination itself. So I was perhaps afraid of a basic encounter with our deepest human problems. The wonder of it all is that, allowing for obvious differences of material and style, there is a near identity of spirit in his work and mine. Despite his denial and my embracing of worldly challenges, our work shares a spatial freedom and spiritual radiance that proves to me that neither of us was inhibited creatively by our personality characteristics. He, in spite of his sense of persecution, and I, in my naive friendship with the world, produced works of similar spirit. It is miraculous! And of course, truthfully, neither of us was without something of the other; life and work enforced both detachment and involvement in each of us.

I did not see Mark Rothko during the last couple of years of his life after his health and his private affairs both broke. I can guess how much deeper this drove him into himself, into the terrible final isolation at the tiny center of his soul, from which no view out was possible. It is because every creative man has been at that point, indeed must be, at the purest moments of his creative activity, that I cannot altogether grieve for Mark. His death, like his life, was a protection for the pure, central spark of his genius. Since all of us artists must learn to protect this gift as best we can, whatever our degree of "outside" involvement, in a sense Mark died for all of us. So I prefer to salute his form of battle.

I want him to know at last that I found his attitude admirable.