The Big Pictures

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Yve-Alain Bois

In contrast to the Twombly and Klee, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonne (Yale University Press, $150) is very much the work of an author. Given his fabulous command of the material, it is unfortunate that David Anfam's brilliant comments on individual works (covering technical, stylistic, thematic, and formal issues, not to mention aspects of conservation) are not dispersed among the entries. One can easily guess that with such a vast production (there are 834 entries), and one that becomes increasingly serial, this decision was made to avoid redundancy, but a compromise could have been found so that peculiarities would be highlighted in the entries. Rather, Anfam has written a long and beautiful essay in four parts, with abundant remarks (sometimes parked in the footnotes) referring to the works reproduced later in the book, all in color except for the few works no longer extant. The design is gorgeous but terribly impractical, as one is obliged to shift constantly between Anfam's text at the beginning of the volume (sadistically set by the designer in a tiny font and in lines that run on for several miles) and the illustrations. The more one advances in the essay, the more the muscular effort becomes unbearable (this is a heavy tome). Those who hazard the courage to brave these obstacles and treat Anfam's opus as something other than the magnificent coffee-table book it also is will be rewarded: It is far and away the best monograph ever written on Rothko.

Anfam has avoided most of the booby traps associated with the painter: the transcendentalist "spiritual" mishmash (he explains its function in the Rothko literature but keeps his distance), the "biographism" (no, the late "black paintings" are not about depression), the referential mania (no, there is no landscape there). And he provides ample new food for thought (I did not know, for example, of the two oblong predellas that Rothko at one point considered placing under some of his Harvard murals). Anfam is particularly eloquent in showing how Rothko increasingly orchestrated his solo exhibitions as color symphonies. My only major criticism (besides the fact that the book is written almost as if Barnett Newman never existed - he's mentioned only once in the text) brings us back to the issue of wholeness: Even though Anfam is cautious at first not to present the early works as premonitory ("Rothko surely cannot have prophesized his idles fixes from scratch," we are told about several late-'30s canvases that seem to prefigure his post-1950 style), he gradually loosens the reins over what seems to be a natural tendency among monograph writers toward anachronism. The sheer accumulation of technical, formal, and thematic continuities that Anfam stresses in passing end up undermining to an extent the apt periodization he proposes. Fortunately, Anfam's main, and extremely convincing, argument - that a poetics of shadows governs Rothko's work before 1936 and after 1957 - reaffirms a temporal disjunction that is essential to understanding the last decade of the artist's production.