Chapter 12 Suicide (February 25, 1970)
“Silence is so accurate.”
Mark Rothko
Do things ever really happen by chance? Was there
some ineluctable logic that drove Rothko to take his own life?
Many myths tell a tale of children who are devoured
or sacrificed by their own parents: Lilith, Chronos, the Bacchantes
who worshipped Dionysius. Antigone buried alive, Iphigeneia offered
to the gods on a pyre.
The sacrificers and the sacrificed: what are the
bonds that link them to each other?
To paint is to trespass or forbidden ground, to
cross a frontier. Like Tiresias, the artist transgresses the gender
barrier, like Lilith, he’s acquainted with the dark side of the
moon.
Rothko identified himself with a great tragic
figure when he committed suicide: the eternal figure of the sacrificed.
Turning the razor edge against his own flesh, he simultaneously
became a sacrificer and one scarified. His compassion was lost
in murderous violence, only it was a violence that stopped short
of destroying his work. It was only his own self he destroyed:
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz, sixty-six years and five
months earlier in Dvinsk, Russia.
His death wasn’t planned. It was night, he was
alone; the darkness and his own blood closed in around him, sparing
his work, but not his person--he who was a creation unto himself,
a kind of Promethean hero who had forged himself much the same
way he’d forged his work.
No doubt he had a horror of his own image. No
doubt there was a hellish power in the splendor of his color compositions.
There was no salvation for him, just as there was none for Van
Gogh, de Staël, or Gorky.
You take your own life when your despair becomes
too dark, when madness strikes too hard. It’s an act of revenge
or self-punishment. You do it because you want to show the world
you’re suffering without remission; you want to tell God He’s
abandoned your kind; you want to cry out that there must be more
to life than this unhappiness you’re experiencing; you cannot
bear the thought of Auchwitz and Hiroshima.
There are many reasons for not wanting to go on
living. And it’s not as if you haven’t got the courage to keep
going.
Ending It All
“Who is this man, Mark
Rothko, who killed my friend?” asked Hedda Sterne, expressing the consternation and bafflement caused
by her fellow artist’s suicide. […]
Two years earlier, he had almost died of a stroke
and had spent three weeks recovering in an intensive care ward.
He had had to stop working and had felt he was finished as a painter.
As a result, he had became obsessed with illness, and had even
imagined he had cancer until tests showed the contrary.
His depression worsened and became chronic. He
took dangerous tranquilizers and continued to punish his body
and mind by smoking and drinking heavily. […]
Next morning at nine, Rothko’s assistant, Oliver
Steindecker, found him lying in a pool of congealed blood on the
floor of the small room next to his studio, which served as a
combination bathroom and kitchenette. There was no note, nothing
to explain this desperate act.
Rothko appears to have swallowed a large quantity
of the neuroleptic pills his psychiatrist prescribed, before slitting
his veins above his elbows, a less common but faster method of
committing suicide than slitting one’s wrists. […]
Violence and Self-Hatred
Guilt; self-dramatization, and a fascination with
ritual sacrifice are the predominant elements in Rothko’s last
gesture. The artist found it hard to deal with success. Perhaps
the thought that he was now more successful than his father had
ever been was unbearable to him. On a symbolic level, becoming
a great American painter may have amounted to driving another
nail into the coffin of the obscure pharmacist from Dvinsk, Jacob
Rothkowitz. […]
But ultimately there’s no point in trying to establish
a coherence here. Death interrupted Rothko in the midst of his
work. Nothing in the very last of his paintings suggests that
he knew he was about to die. His large Red on Red study remains
unfinished. The dark pool of blood on his studio floor had all
the power of one last, ephemeral work. […]