Volume 52, Number 4 · March 10, 2005
The Artist in Search of Himself
By John Golding
The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art
by Mark Rothko
Yale University Press, 136 pp., $25.00
The publication of an ambitious, hitherto unknown manuscript by one of the greatest painters of his age can only be a cause for celebration, although in the case of Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art the celebration can only be muted, and qualified. As early as 1936 Milton Avery, who was close to Rothko at the time, wrote to a mutual friend, 'to Marcus' last night his book is coming along fine, sounds pretty good to me.'[1] This was known as the 'scribble book,' a rough treatise for a manual on teaching children's art; it is not the book under review, although the two works may be distantly connected. In his otherwise admirable introduction to The Artist's Reality Christopher Rothko, the artist's son, makes no mention of the teaching manual. He dates the newly published text, convincingly, and partly on documentary evidence, to 1940–1941. Rothko's eventual heirs, his two children, were aware of the existence of his writing, but after his suicide in 1970 and the unpleasant legal wrangles over the estate which followed it, involving the contents of his studio, the manuscript was put aside with other papers and only rediscovered relatively recently by a research assistant, Marion Kahan.
Review, 3728 words
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