Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas by David Anfam Yale £75 in UK until January 31st, £95 thereafter
This is the first volume of the definitive catalogue raisonne of the work of one of the century's foremost abstract painters. A decade in the making, it is a formidable achievement, with over eight hundred colour plates augmented by an informed, perceptive commentary on the artist's development, from early studies of his New York surroundings to the austerely beautiful black-on-grey canvases made during the final year of his life. Rothko is the abstract painter whose name is most likely to be invoked in conjunction with the word "spiritual". Born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903, he was ten when his family emigrated to the United States. In New York City, he aspired to make an art of "eternal symbols . . . of man's primitive fears and motivations". But his attempts to devise what was in essence a religious iconography for his time were doomed to failure. His figurative work is largely unsatisfactory. It's not just that he couldn't find the right idiom. He was simply not equipped to be a great figurative artist. Nothing really came together until, in the second half of the 1940s, he began to dissolve the linear scaffolding of his compositions in amorphous pools of colour. From that point on the pace of transformation was dramatic. By the early 1950s he was working confidently in the format that served him for the last two decades of his life: bands and oblongs of pure, saturated colour, from deep, sonorous greys and purples to zingy yellows and oranges.
His paintings delighted and thrilled the eye, but Rothko also wanted to stir the soul, something that, by general consent, he did very effectively. In retrospect, David Anfam suggests, those gaseous oblongs suffused with coloured light have associations with the illuminated cinema screen or the cathode ray tube of the television set. Even in their scale the paintings seemed to aspire to the cinema screen. Large works were, Rothko felt, more intimate, a contention put to the test in the vast purple voids of the murals that make up the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This melancholy installation is the logical culmination of the spiritual aspirations of his art. But he still had his doubts. Though he was critically and financially successful, he deeply mistrusted both forms of approval. He never banished personal unhappiness and professional insecurity. Beset by myriad anxieties and, later, illness, he drank heavily and slipped into a dependency on prescription drugs. On February 26th, 1970, he took an overdose of barbiturates and slashed his arms. Since his death the critical debate that evidently raged in his own mind has been endlessly replayed, if never quite resolved. On the one hand there is the pure optical sensationalism of his work, its unquestioned emotional power, on the other its all-or-nothing bid for tragic and timeless status - a bid on which, finally, he wagered his life.
Aidan Dunne is art critic of The Irish Times