Editing Mark Rothko (section)

===Reactions to his own success===
Shortly thereafter, due to the ''Fortune'' magazine plug and further purchases by clients, Rothko's financial situation began to improve. In addition to sales of paintings, he also had money from his teaching position at [[Brooklyn College]]. In 1954, he exhibited in a solo show at the [[Art Institute of Chicago]], where he met art dealer [[Sidney Janis]], who represented Pollock and [[Franz Kline]]. Their relationship proved mutually beneficial.{{sfn|Breslin|1993|p=297–42}}

Despite his fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion and a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion and that collectors, critics, and audiences were not grasping his work's true purpose. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential and must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly nonverbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those who inquired after its meaning and purpose, saying finally that silence is "so accurate": <blockquote>My paintings' surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles, you can find everything I want to say.{{citation needed|date=September 2021}}</blockquote>

Rothko began to insist that he was not an [[abstractionist]] and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

{{blockquote|only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions ... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.<ref>Baal-Teshuva, p. 50.</ref>}}

For Rothko, color was "merely an instrument",<ref>Baal-Teshuva, p. 57.</ref> and the signature paintings were just a simpler, purer form of expressing the same basic human emotions as his surrealistic mythological paintings. Rothko's comment on viewers breaking down in tears before his paintings may have convinced the [[Dominique de Menil|de Menils]] to construct the Rothko Chapel. As he grew older, hingeing around the late 1950s, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas grew increasingly dark, and his bright reds, yellows, and oranges were subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays, and blacks.{{sfn|Breslin|1993|p=333–42}}

Rothko's friend, the art critic [[Dore Ashton]], points to the artist's acquaintance with poet Stanley Kunitz as a significant bond in this period ("conversations between painter and poet fed into Rothko's enterprise"). Kunitz saw Rothko as "a primitive, a shaman who finds the magic formula and leads people to it". Great poetry and painting, Kunitz believed, both had "roots in magic, incantation, and spell-casting" and were, at their core, ethical and spiritual. Kunitz instinctively understood the purpose of Rothko's quest.{{sfn|Ashton|1983|p=150–151}}

In November 1958, Rothko gave an address to the [[Pratt Institute]]. In a tenor unusual for him, he discussed art as a trade and offered the <blockquote>recipe of a work of art—its ingredients—how to make it—the formula

# There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality ... Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
# Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship with things that exist.
# Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
# Irony, This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
# Wit and play ... for the human element.
# The ephemeral and chance ... for the human element.
# Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.<ref>Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.). ''Rothko'' (London: Tate Gallery, 2008), p. 91</ref></blockquote>