Bass in Rothko Chapel

Yesterday, I went to the National Gallery of Art. It had started raining outside. Trees were in bloom. I started in the west building, where I saw some impressionist works. I'm trying to recall which ones they were. Toulouse-Lautrec: people in ill-lit nightclubs, in-profile, faces puffy and fatigued, bored by routine at the very place people go to avoid boredom. Glancing at some cubist paintings I was reminded of something Jonathan Goldstein said on Wiretap... Lingering at portraits of the founding fathers by Gilbert Stuart (recalling a particularly idiotic comment by somebody who called in tonight to a debate on NPR about healthcare reform, who claimed that the founding fathers were men of genius, and that he didn't care what law scholars said about anything, and that the founding fathers really knew what freedom was, and that the government was somehow violating his freedom... and a particularly lucid call from somebody else, suggesting that much of the opposition to the Obama administration is race-related... ) a small painting by... Whistler (?) of a street scene in Venice; a 20th century painting of Mount Khatadin by somebody whose name I can't recall, the clouds in the same purplish-grayish-blue palette as the mountain... and then red and orange of the autumn leaves, and a lone pine tree at the edge of a pond...

Then I came to Rothko.

Why do I like Rothko? I wish I could state this concisely, but at a quarter to one in the morning... I guess it's the fact that those later paintings, the ones that are just compositions of rectangles are so emphatically non-representational. And they seem so absolute. Rothko is not trying; he is succeeding... nothing seems to be standing between Rothko's expression and the viewer's reception. We are not impressed by virtuosity or effects of any sort... the works seem nearly artless, the soft edges and textures suggestive of improvisation and meditation, experimentation without the zealousness of Mondrian, for instance.

I feel apologetic for liking Rothko.

But I don't want to talk about that.

In the tower of the National Gallery, there was a sort of reproduction of Rothko Chapel. There were the paintings: enormous canvases of black squares on black backgrounds. The Morton Feldman composition was playing over some speakers. Watching one of the canvases, in the same way one watches a cloud, I guess, I noticed something that seemed, at that moment, uncanny: the figure of a man at the edge of a deep pit: Rothko's self-portrait, the artist contemplating his impending suicide. And I wondered whether the paintings were supposed to be open to these sorts of ridiculous interpretations, whether Rothko had considered that onto his works, the viewer would, if only for a moment, impose some absurd idea of representation: a landscape, a window, Dante (or Orpheus?), ...

Perhaps I like Rothko because he can't possibly disappoint. The stakes are so low, the elements so reduced. Nobody should waste time on something so obvious. Why should anybody waste time on anything less absolute?