From: mars1933@hotmail.com

    The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko
is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes
discussed at The Occidental Quarterly. Central to Rothko's story is
the political radicalism of Eastern European Jewish migrants arriving
in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of
these migrants and their descendants to the traditional people and
culture of their new homeland; and how this hostility was reflected in
the artistic and intellectual currents that dominated Western
societies during the 20th century. Rothko's story also exemplifies
other familiar themes including: the force of Jewish ethnic networking
and nepotism in promoting Jewish interests, and the tendency for
Jewish "genius" to be constructed by the Jewish intellectual
establishment as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.

    With Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko has been accorded a leading
place in the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists. If there is such a
thing as a cult artist among the liberal Jewish intelligentsia, then
Rothko is probably it. Important people stand in grave silence before
his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty
thoughts. As a critic for The Times noted:

Rothko evokes all that could be criticized as most pretentious,
most clannish, most pseudish about his spectators. They stand
there gravely perusing something that to the outsider probably
looks more like a patch of half-stripped wallpaper than a picture
and then declare themselves profoundly moved. And many out-
siders will start to wonder if they are being duped, if this Mod-
ernist emperor actually has no clothes on and his fans are just
the blind followers of some aesthetic faith.

   For critics like Ottmann, Rothko's genius is indisputable and he
possessed an "extraordinary talent" that enabled him to transfer his
metaphysical "impulses to the canvas with a power and magnetism
that stuns viewers of his work. . . . In fact Rothko's skill in
achieving this result-whether intentional or not-perhaps explains why
he was once called 'the melancholic rabbi.'"1 For prominent Jewish art
historian Simon Schama, Rothko's "big vertical canvasses of
contrasting bars of colour, panels of colour stacked up on top of each
other" qualify Rothko as "a maker of paintings as powerful and
complicated as anything by his two gods-Rembrandt and Turner." For the
ethnocentric Schama "these [Rothko's] paintings are equivalent of
these old masters.

   After experimenting with Expressionism and Surrealism, Rothko
arrived in 1949 at the signature style that would typify his work
until his death by suicide in 1970 at the age of 66. This consisted of
two or three floating rectangles of colour painted against a
monochrome background. A pioneer of "colour-field" painting, Rothko
claimed that only abstract painting could express the "full gravity of
religious yearnings and the angst of the human condition." His final
works became so minimalistic (large black canvasses) as to be almost
void of any substance.

   As an educated family and active Zionists, the Rothkowitz family
spoke Hebrew in addition to Russian and Yiddish. Whereas the older
siblings attended public schools along with many other Jewish chil-
dren concentrated in one neighbourhood of Portland, father Rothko-
witz decided that Marcus would receive a strict religious education.

   Rothko's parents saw no contradiction in bringing up their son as
an Orthodox Jew, a Zionist, and a Communist. This is quite in keeping
with Kevin MacDonald's observation that "within [pre-Bolshevik]
Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideol-
ogy often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense
commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separa-
tism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing
combinations of these ideas."14


  His entire family was in favour of the Russian Revolution, as Rothko
later said."15 This was, of course, very typical, with Jewish
historian Norman Cantor noting that: "In the first half of the
twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist communism ran like an
electromagnetic lightning flash through Jewish societies from Moscow
to Western Europe, the United States and Canada, gaining the lifelong
adherence of brilliant, passionately dedicated Jewish men and wom-
en."16

   Rothko excelled academically at Lincoln High School in Portland,
and was a passionate debater for the radical cause, and "went to hear
the firecracker orator 'Red' Emma Goldman lay into capitalism and
sing the praises of the Russian Revolution."19

  Rothko believed that one's means of artistic expression was
"unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn
from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity,
simplicity and directness of children."32 Such grandiloquent
pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Collings noting that
"Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements
about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art."33

   This tendency on the part of Rothko prompted one writer to de-
clare: "What I find amazing . . . is how a painting which is two
rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon
thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and
social construction." He suggests that a good rule of thumb is "that
the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a
work, the less worth the painting has. By this definition Rothko may
be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity." Another
critic humorously observed that Rothko needed to be fluent in
rationalizing his existence and validating himself as a relevant
artist to the average idiot who spent tens of thousands of dollars on
paintings which could be easily reproduced by anyone with a pulse and
a paint brush. Rothko . .. learned to garner attention to his
paintings by getting into a frenzied drama-queen state and
hysterically claiming that his works were deep, profound statements
and not just indiscriminate blobs of color. They were expressions that
rejected society's expectation of technical expertise, actual talent
and an artist's evolution over time.

   Lasha Darkmoon has noted the tendency of Jewish artists to set
about redefining the very nature of artistic excellence to allow for
their own technical inadequacies. She observes that: "Whatever Jewish
artists were good at, that would be the art of the future. If Jews
were no good at drawing, good drawing would no longer be necessary."
She cites Israel Shamir who notes that the "preparation of these items
[of non-figurative art] places no demand on artistic abilities. They
can be done by anybody." Darkmoon elaborates:

In order to succeed in this difficult profession, the visually chal-

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