Rothko: The Late Series, recently ending its run at the Tate Modern, was, despite the crowds it drew, a rather empty encounter. This emptiness is, perhaps, not unexpected given what we have come to know of Rothko: serial blocks, grids and strips of colour, resistant to narrative, obdurate and unyielding. The Tate’s limited selection of a narrow palette, closely arranged, made for a puzzling and disenchanted kind of viewing. The familiar Seagram murals of the ‘Rothko Room’ put together with a selection from the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art and Washington National Gallery of Art, formed the centre of this new exhibition, which branched into a set of smaller arrangements (the Black-Form series, the Brown and Gray works) and what seemed little more than a corridor display of preparatory sketches and cursorily-pencilled plans. Here, hastily hatched grids sketched on paper were displayed as though they might make a claim to be regarded as works in themselves, and though such studies might allow for an intriguing access into artistic process and preparatory meditations, here the prizing of Rothko’s preliminary sketches incurred a certain embarrassment. The display of these plans seemed an attempt to attest to the careful consideration given by the artist to the arrangement of his work; but for those who would willing enter this exhibition, it served as a clumsy and unnecessary assurance of his integrity that had almost the opposite effect. If you choose to engage with Rothko’s taciturn forms, those patiently repeated blocks of colour, then you must already believe in their integrity and attend willingly and trustingly with the belief that they will yield something. And this, ironically, is what the Tate Modern exhibition disclosed most efficiently, if unsatisfactorily: Rothko requires belief. You must believe in Rothko if only so that Rothko’s work might disclose to you an idea of belief that is perhaps the emptiest thing of all.

Rothko famously claimed that the people who wept before his paintings were undergoing the same religious experience he had undergone in their production, and this notion of a sacred kind of aesthetic encounter is one he repeatedly affirms in the late interviews and conversations that accompany the late work. The late works are profoundly religious works. Rothko acknowledged Kierkegaard’s Abraham as an important influence; the Brown, Black and Sienna on Dark Wine canvases of 1963 he explained as an evocation of Christ’s suffering; and the last triptychs for the Houston chapel (an installation he did not live to see), confirm that commitment. Religious expression, though, cannot take any demonstrable or explicit form in the late series – instead, the canvases are scrupulously resistant to that kind of articulation. Indeed, they assiduously abstain from any sure statement. Rather, Rothko seems to work instead at the sacrality of surfaces, the faith of a non-representational formlessness. Form fastens onto feeling, but formlessness too is its own means. Rothko’s late work seeks a feeling that is untethered to any form or thing; the broad, blank washes of surface colour sacrifice the suggestion of any object materiality for a more immediate expressive affectivity. If at times, those patiently worked surfaces intimate density, such intimations are illusory - the canvases stubbornly offer up surface as surface. When Rothko’s surfaces seem to conjure depth, conjure things, conjure a world even - the Brown and Gray series in particular sometimes resembles the austere diurnal motion of a northern hemisphere horizon, sometimes seems like the edge of the world or a moon - these passing impressions easily sink away as the painterly surfaces surface once more as surface. If Rothko’s late series achieves depth, then it is a depth born of reflection, but which insistently returns to its blanket surface. Rothko’s canvases determinedly conjure surfaces that belong to no object and under which there are no things. And yet it is precisely this resistance to objects, to things, to worlds, that renders these works profoundly religious.

 In his own late work, Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud recounts a letter from an atheistic friend who describes being, nonetheless, subject to a particular feeling of religiosity ‘of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’.  This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it …  On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion’.  Freud, though, remained unconvinced by this feeling, and diagnosed it as an error:  ‘…if I have understood my friend correctly, what he has in mind is the same as the consolation that an original and rather eccentric writer offers his hero before his freely chosen death: ‘We cannot fall out of this world’.  It is a feeling then, of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself.  I would say that for me this is more in the nature of an intellectual insight, not of course without an emotional overtone, though this will not be wanting in other acts of thought that are similar in scope’.

Freud informs his friend that the ‘oceanic’ feeling of cosmic unity, a feeling of something limitless and unbounded was only the manifestation of a narcissistic ego - an ego that sees itself in all things and whose ‘feeling of religiosity’ is only an expression of that absolute narcissism.  For Freud, the oceanic feeling of religion reminds us of an ego that is bound up with the world, an ego that cannot fall out of the world, but which also understands itself in relation to all things.  This is an ego that is not just incapable of falling out of the world, but one who is originally in the world, who identifies with all things.  Rothko’s aesthetic religion though is the inversion of this.  The late series articulates an idea of religious belief that is resistant to things, which is not identifiable as any material thing in the world, but is, at its most sacred, only expressive surface.

 The Black-Form series is perhaps the emptiest and most effective of all Rothko’s arrangements insofar as this series articulates the determined resistance to things most profoundly.  Rothko’s religion is necessarily without things - the late series intimates this idea of a belief which cannot depend on things.  Rothko’s black grids resolutely reserve the presence of no thing.  Rothko’s abstention challenges his audience not to believe in things, in order that they may believe in more than things, or the feeling beyond things.  The ideality of belief requires this emptiness - a feeling not of absence or vacancy or loss, but precisely of something more than what might be seen in any given object, thing or world.  The late series, at the last, assert a belief in belief itself, a belief in something more.   

‘I was always looking for something more’    Rothko, 1970

‘THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR’ - A conference hosted by the School of Humanities (English), Avenue Campus, University of Southampton - SEPTEMBER 19-21, 2008

Further details.

When I was a child, I wasn’t so much scared of ghosts, as scared of seeing Jesus. I was terrified by the thought of him appearing at the foot of my bed, in a halo of light. It’s not that I thought he would hurt me; I simply felt that true awe would be overwhelming: a state that would probably result in my death. Either that or my mother would find me literally petrified in bed, all scrunched up like a cat on the side of the road. Once I played dead when my mother came upstairs to check on me, then laughed: gotcha. She didn’t think it was funny and walked away in disgust.

I enjoy talking now about things I would never have shared as a child. For instance, last year, after watching Michael Haneke’s Caché with her (“he must have been so brave,” she said, about Majid), I told my mother about the time (I must have been about four or five) when, playing with a vicar’s son and two little girls who lived on my street, we discovered the dead body of a baby bird. “May the Lord strike down whichever one of us stood on this bird,” said the vicar’s son. I had always assumed I was the culprit; I was never sure it wasn’t me. But when I told my mother this she laughed and said it was probably the vicar’s son, the little turd. I suddenly felt better after all those years.

The other week when I went out to a pub quiz in Bridgend (not as yet) with a heavily pregnant Emma and a not-at-all pregnant Emma, I told the story of a haunted house I had once stayed in. It was an old house in France owned by an English couple who, while I was getting my cases from the car, told one and all about the priest who was due to visit in order to carry out an exorcism. “Do. Not. Tell. Nemonie.” (sic) my boyfriend advised, on account of my being a known sissy. He then spent most of the holiday in a state of profound terror as, after he’d drunk his way towards sleep, I’d tend to say things like, “Can you hear those children singing?” Eventually, when I asked him why he was so haggard, he replied “Look. The house is haunted, OK?” in the fractured tones more usually employed to register ‘pain’ in teen dramas. I told one Emma that I actually wouldn’t have been frightened of seeing a ghost anyway; that I’d always been more frightened at the thought of seeing Jesus. She gave me such a look of understanding. Then she told me the story of her Grandma G.

Grandma G’s mother lost a child, and she cried and cried on its grave day after day. Eventually Jesus (sic) visited Grandma G’s mother and gestured to her that she must stop crying now because she was to have another child. When Grandma G was born, one of the pupils of her eyes was shaped like a teardrop, and always was. I met Grandma G. She had petit mal, a kind of catalepsy that meant she might fall asleep and then forget where she was, or go back in time. She was happy and giggly, but sad. She had a voice like a cat’s miaow. Grandma G used to tell Emma the story about her mother and Jesus, and Emma was terrified to think that Jesus might visit her too.

I’ve never understood that part of religion which dismisses what is human. Nonetheless, neither Emma nor I wanted Jesus to visit us with his big blue eyes and his centre parting. In Bridgend. No siree.