Aaron Rosen

FINDING ROTHKOWITZ: THE JEWISH ROTHKO

While Mark Rothkos canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he commented in 1956, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by “religious experience” has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothkos Jewish identity—informed by his experiences in Russia and New York—influenced his understanding of “religious experience” in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothkos work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothkos sense of “religious experience” as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artists Jewishness.

Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: antisemitism, assimilation, affirmation

of commemoration and social memory. If the “Holocaust myth” dominates American culture then why were the effects of this not more apparent among his interviewees? If Rejak’s interest is in the use and appropriation of the Holocaust in public commemoration, as his concluding discussion suggests, he might have been better to make this the focus of his study and construct his interviews through this prism.