In July 1958, Mark Rothko began work on a commission for a Four Seasons dining room in New York City. By 1960, Rothko withdrew the pictures. He had visited the restaurant with his wife, Mell, and realized that the decadent room, just beyond a marble pool and replete with linen-lined tables, was no place for his artwork. As James Breslin writes in his 1993 biography on Rothko, the next morning the artist “came through the door like a bull … in an absolute rage,” as his assistant Dan Rice recalled. The painter threw his hat down and roared, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”   

The spirited Rothko is the subject of an exquisite show at the National Gallery of Art, which houses the largest public collection of the artist’s oeuvre. Focused on Rothko’s works on paper, the exhibition of some 100 paintings presents the artist in all his complexity: a man of surfaces consumed by the depths.  

The show opens with Rothko’s work from the early 1930s. In one picture, “Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse),” a figure with dark hair, tightly pulled back, looks out from an exuberantly warm scene. Her stare is blank, lips a puddle of muddied crimson. The frenzied watercolor mingles brick reds with salmon pinks, tangerines with passages of navy, all coalescing into an unsettling portrait of a woman unknown.

“The great achievements of the centuries,” Rothko wrote in his 1947 essay “The Romantics Were Prompted,” “were the pictures of the single human figure—alone in a moment of utter immobility.” 

“The Bathers” has that air of solitude about it. Completed on a visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1934, the watercolor in dingy teals and muddied grays reveals four beachgoers huddled before a cresting wave. The group, in an otherwise deserted scene, is imprecise, remote. One of the people, pictured in the center, looks out with a blank stare, her eyes two darkened shadows. The effect is chilling. 

Like the bather, Rothko was alone even when he wasn’t. Born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia (present-day Latvia), Markus Rothkowitz was an outsider from an early age. In the summer of 1913, he moved with his mother and sisters to Portland, Oregon, where, Breslin recounts, “he never felt entirely at home.” 

In high school, Rothko was not allowed to join the debate society because he was Jewish. Instead, he revived a letters-to-the-editor section of his school paper. An avid reader, Rothko was especially fond of Greek historian and geographer Herodotus, whom he quoted from memory for decades. He was an equally precocious musician and could play the mandolin and piano by ear. As a relative recalled, Rothko spent hours on the couch listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. His ear for music comes through in the 1944 watercolor, “Undersea Cabaret,” a diffuse melody of slate grays and pale greens, swirls of red and golden yellow, each rippling across the work’s surface, as if musical notes in time. 

As his fascination with Herodotus might suggest, Rothko also gravitated to Greek myths—stories that “hold us,” he said in a 1943 radio interview, stories that stir “something real and existing in ourselves.” In mythology, Rothko found “joy mollified by death and despair,” says Adam Greenhalgh, the curator of NGA’s Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper, “something essential about human experience.” 

The painter’s own experience was fractured. He moved from Portland to New Haven, Connecticut, in late 1921 to begin his studies at Yale University, where he received a scholarship. But he left two years later, landing in New York, where he embarked on his art career in earnest. In the city, Rothko joined the Art Students League, a fine arts school in Manhattan, and, by 1929, began teaching art at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he worked until 1952. 

Rothko experimented with forms by turns figurative and abstract before settling on his signature fields of color. These early works, from the 1930s and ’40s—the show’s crowning jewels, in my view—reveal a painter who is experimental, reveling in the twists and turns of the brush and the smoldering effects of color. 

In an untitled watercolor from 1944, Rothko depicts a restlessness too jarring for words. World War II was raging and Rothko put that chaos to paper. In the work, furious cobalt blues and wire-thin blacks are layered on a smoky gray ground, dappled with washes of scarlet and sea green. 

“There is a hint of sadness,” Greenhalgh says of the watercolor, “which is always there in Rothko’s work, from the beginning.” 

“The painter’s life is a disrupted one,” Rothko wrote to artist Clay Spohn in 1948. “One begins by sparring with his insides with one leg still in the normal world,” Rothko expounds. “Then you are caught up in a frenzy that brings you to the edge of madness.” What follows are “dazed weeks” when the artist is “only half alive.” This maddening spiral comes through in Rothko’s thunderous pictures, each beautifully unsettled.  

Another watercolor from 1944, ominously titled “Omen,” presents a field of taupe overlaid with spindly fire reds and undulating, creamy whites. The work, a kind of pietà, recalls the Virgin Mother mourning her son, the silence broken by a single, piercing cry.

A painting lives and dies in the eyes of the observer, Rothko asserted in a 1947 journal article: “It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.” But Rothko took the risk. He understood that “painting is a kind of hinge,” Greenhalgh says, “something transformative can happen in the act of looking.” 

Gazing at a Rothko is a meditative act. Take, for instance, an untitled oil on paper from 1959. In the absorbing work, blocks of blue gray and scarlet are set against a magenta ground, the forms rising and falling, as if in a fever dream. A decade later, Rothko painted another incandescent work, this one an acrylic on paper, of fiery orange overlaid with two dense clouds of carmine red, a narrow passage of coral running between them. In the show, these works unfurl and shimmer, their vivid tonality and dense fields of color energetic, giving off their own marvelous light. 

The effect did not come easy for Rothko. He worked “like a demon,” as he put it in a 1946 letter to his mother and sister. He was impatient and nervous, a man of “tremendous doubts and tremendous ego,” the artist Hedda Sterne observes in Breslin’s biography. 

Rothko suffered from an aortic aneurysm in April of 1968. He took several months to recuperate, then returned to work, completing more than 100 paintings on paper by the year’s end. In fact, 1968 was the painter’s most productive year. In his Brown and Gray series that followed, Rothko staged light and dark side by side in works that are quiet and somber—overwhelmingly so. Standing before these pictures, it feels as if you might fall in, or through. 

The pared-down palette of his Brown and Gray paintings was a clear break from Rothko’s earlier, sumptuous works, but the artist was content to recast himself. “Being an outsider was acceptable, even desirable, for Rothko, as long as he chose that position,” Breslin observed.

Everything about Rothko’s work was deliberate. “He was, if nothing else, controlling,” Greenhalgh says. Rothko saw himself as a kind of director, setting the stage with the precision of a surgeon, each turn of the hand timed to perfection.  

Like any good performance, there are multiple stories playing out simultaneously. When Rothko was making his Brown and Gray pictures, he was also painting works of soft lavender, ballerina pink, and periwinkle blue. These charming pastel-tinged works on paper—some of the artist’s last—are arrayed in the final room of the exhibition, a kind of graceful bow. Rothko died by suicide in February 1970. He was found in his studio by an assistant Oliver Steindecker. 

One work in Paintings on Paper that surges with life sits in one of the first rooms of the show. In the 1938 watercolor, “Untitled (seated figure in interior),” a person stares at a portrait, the two in profile. The observed face—of electric blues and blush pinks—echoes the observer’s. The face looking in, though, is comparably sallow, awash in ochre- and blue-tinged grays. The two are uprooted, unsettled. Nothing sits still in this work of ecstatic brushwork, like a moth fluttering before the light.

“The most important tool the artist fashions,” Rothko wrote in 1947, “is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed.” Rothko saw a need to bring the outsider in. He did not respond with restaurant art, something to amuse, but with works alive with color and serpentine brushwork. He responded with a miracle.  

Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper is on view through March 31 at the National Gallery of Art East Building. nga.gov. Free.