Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton — a retrospective full of surprises

Less than a decade old, the Fondation Louis Vuitton now stages exhibitions as stellar as those in Paris’s most venerable museums and has established itself as France’s embassy for American art. Frank Gehry’s giant spaces and exuberant architecture — the glassy curved building in the Bois de Boulogne suggests billowing sails — proved a perfect match for Joan Mitchell last autumn and Basquiat and Warhol in the spring. Ellsworth Kelly, prominent in the permanent collection, follows in 2024. The new Mark Rothko show, with more than 100 paintings, half borrowed from museums across America, sets the bar very high indeed.

From the first instant, the show surprises and convinces. You expect an abstraction and instead get Rothko’s elusive “Self-portrait” (1936): maroon and red columns of tie and shirt, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, gaze turned inward. In the final room, late solemnity suddenly gives way to blurry tangerine and burgundy rectangles hovering on a pink ground, “No 3 (Untitled/Orange)” (1967), radiating heat and intensity.

Rothko’s refined early subway pictures — “Entrance to Subway”, “Untitled (The Subway)”, “Underground Fantasy” — are a revelation: poignant depictions of urban alienation in 1930s New York. With their clarity of columns, pillars, platforms as narrow, artificially lit stages, walls as flat screens, they are preparations for the signature paintings to come.

Their immediate wartime successors, thinly painted animal-human hybrids from myth, owe something to Surrealism’s biomorphic creatures and even more to Rothko’s search for a tragic language. He wanted man, bird, beast and tree “to merge into a single tragic idea”. “Sacrifice of Iphigenia”, a swirling black cone on a strip of white stage, plays out against a monochrome yellow ground. In “Agitation of the Archaic”, amoeba-like and geometric shapes swim in a sub-aquatic environment divided into zones of turquoise, white, green.

Soon these zones became the main act — “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes are the performers”, Rothko explained. In the crimson-pink harmony “Aeolian Harp/No 7” and a luscious untitled abstraction, both 1946, the figures (in diluted pigment, applied in thin glazes) are mere phantoms, reverberating like lingering notes from the strings, before taking flight forever.

In 1949 MoMA bought Matisse’s “The Red Studio” and Rothko visited daily to study this masterclass in pictorial unity: objects suspended in space along a flat plane, harmonised by monochrome colour. In 1950 he painted “No 5/No 22”, a red band tinting and deepening large panels of yellow above and orange beneath. This too was acquired by MoMA, and is loaned here. It’s pivotal, heralding the classic Rothko composition: rectangles in complementary or dissonant colours appearing to float on the canvas surface, their ragged edges allowing a seeping and blending so that every hue contains another.

The format quickly became vertical — Rothko wanted to echo the viewer’s body. Among the first was “No 7” (1951): lilac, copper and orange bands bleeding into a fuchsia-peach ground, everything in flux. It is loaned by the Yageo Foundation, based in Taiwan, which bought it in 2021 for $82.5mn.

Through the 1950s-60s, within what might have been a restrictive framework, Rothko extracted a breadth of expressiveness, of painting as pleasure and danger, absorption and confrontation, surface versus depth, opacity versus reflectiveness. Layering many translucent strata of pigments, rubbing them down with a soft brush or rag, then using a dry brush to scrub in the primary wash, he created colours which are rich and saturated, or disembodied and vaporous — infinitely various.

Colour spreads across “Light Area over Red (Pink and White over Red)” like a blush. In “Light Cloud, Dark Cloud”, the enveloping deep-red central panel bursts forward, marching towards us, while the white “cloud” and another pinkish shape melt into the surrounding orange. In the Menil Collection’s “No 10”, saffron and canary-yellow rectangles are weightless on a mustard ground, the condensed palette giving intense luminescence. The Whitney’s “Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red)” blazes like an icon, its broad golden centre pushing other colours to the margins.

These are among Rothko’s crowning achievements from 1954-57, when fiery reds, soft pinks and yellows took the lead in the warm, fulsome paintings everyone loves. Their counterpoint is between flow and order: horizontal blocks of drenched colour unfold like expansive horizons, descendants of sublime landscape painting — “this man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”, Rothko quipped — yet are compressed, locked together in vertical, grid-like structures. To viewers who dare find them serene, Rothko warned that they were violent, that “the only balance admissible is the precariousness before the instant of the disaster.”

With Tate’s brooding, claustrophobic maroon, mauve and black columnar “Seagram Murals” (1958), the mood becomes sombre. “I can only say that the dark pictures began in 1957 and have persisted almost compulsively,” Rothko wrote. But sometimes brightness persists — Clyfford Still called it “the brightness of death” — even as the paint grows denser. In San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “No 14” (1960), orange radiates from the upper section, overwhelming deep ultramarine below.

Our response to the final taut, austere grey-black works is inflected by knowledge of Rothko’s suicide in 1970. It’s a masterstroke to show these with Giacometti’s silhouette figures — a reminder of Rothko’s concern with human scale, intimacy, feeling. “I belong to the generation preoccupied with the human figure,” he insisted.

Harold Rosenberg summed up Abstract Expressionist gloom as Barnett Newman (the tight zip canvases) closing the door, Rothko pulling down the blinds, Ad Reinhardt (who painted mainly in black) turning off the light. Actually in Rothko, light is always flickering and ambivalent. His paintings answer TS Eliot’s call to modernism in “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!/But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.” The paintings scintillate and quiver, within themselves, in interaction with each other, their atmospheres endlessly shifting.

Duncan Phillips wrote of the group he purchased — “Orange, Red on Red”, “Ochre, Red on Red”, “Green and Tangerine on Red” are here — that they evoke “some sense of well being suddenly shadowed by a cloud — yellow ochres strangely suffused with a drift of grey prevailing over an ambience of rose, or the fire diminishing into a glow of embers, or the light when the night descends”.

Rothko wanted as many of his pictures as possible to be shown together, to resonate like a chorus of voices in an immersive environment. “I have made a place,” he said on completing The Seagram Murals. In this ample, generous show, converging landmark and breakthrough paintings and symphonic groups of pictures, he makes place after place. It is as compelling a retrospective of an Abstract Expressionist as I have ever seen in Europe.

To April 2, fondationlouisvuitton.fr