August 5, 1913. Marcus Rothkovitch, almost 10 years old, accompanied by his mother, Anna, and older sister, Sonia, boarded the SS Czar in the Russian port of Libau. They were travelling to join the rest of their family in Portland, Oregon. The Czar arrived in New York on August 17.
The family was Jewish and the Ellis Island immigration authorities "yiddishised" the name to Rothkowitz. The ship's manifest, meanwhile, had the boy down as Markus Rotkowicz. Years later, in 1940, he was to change his name to Mark Rothko. He became one of the greatest painters of his age. He died on February 25, 1970, in the New York studio where he lived, having separated a year earlier from his second wife, Mary Beistle, known as Mell. He had slashed his wrists.
That February afternoon, Mell picked up their six-year-old son, Christopher, from school. He was known as Topher because their dog was called Crispin and, if anybody called for Chris, the dog came and not the boy. Just before they reached their home on East 95th Street, she told him his father had died. "How?" asked Christopher. She told him he had killed himself. Violently, he had ceased being himself and become his myth: Rothko, the tormented artist.
"I like to steer discussions of my father away from suicide," says Christopher now. "It's like Van Gogh's ear. Everybody knows Van Gogh's work, but, if you stop somebody in the street, they'll always mention the ear."
We are sitting in the lower level of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, surrounded by his father's paintings: great shimmering veils, portals and rectangles of colour. Christopher is a slender and precise man in a collarless shirt and very pressed trousers. His father was round, creased and bearish, his face puffy from heavy drinking and chain-smoking. "Four packs of Pall Malls a day," says Christopher, "or Chesterfields, which were worse." But there are some physical similarities.
Christopher is going bald, like his father; he has the same rather bulbous eyes and there is a familiar fussiness about the lips.
He must, I say, have been traumatised by his mother's sudden announcement. "In a perverse sense, it was made easier by the fact that I didn't know him that well. He was terribly ill starting when I was four. He was in hospital for quite some time. Then he was home for a few months and then my parents separated. From the time I was four, he was not a daily presence in my life."
He speaks quickly and precisely. The air of fastidious exactness exuded by the son echoes the frequently infuriating precision of the father, who would fuss interminably about the hanging of his paintings and even about the character of their purchasers. "He saw them as his children," says Christopher, apparently failing to note the poignancy of the remark.
By the time of his suicide, Rothko had chosen to abandon his real children, Christopher at six and Kate at 19. They were even cut out of his will, his paintings being left to a group of "friends" who later turned out to be engaged in a colossal, fraudulent conspiracy. Worse still for the children, soon after their father's suicide, their mother also died. Christopher had to leave New York, where he had been known at school as the boy with the famous artist father, to live with relatives in Columbus, Ohio, where nobody had ever heard of Mark Rothko.
Beyond this tale of chaos and disaster, of brutal uprootings and shifting identities, hang these vast, hypnotic and deeply ambiguous canvases, paintings that still haunt and disturb. They are paintings that are instantly familiar but always uncomfortable. Logically, they are abstracts and yet they seem to be pictures of something concrete, something in, perhaps, a third realm which is neither our mind nor the world.
In the late 1940s, Rothko had discovered his mature style, and he went on to paint hundreds of these pictures that have rendered millions speechless with adoration, bafflement, rage or quasi-religious ecstasy. "Mysterious" is the word that clings most commonly to these paintings. They seem to be messages from another dimension, visions of something so deep inside or so far outside us that we cannot hope to explain their impact in mere words. Nothing in the life of the man seemed to account for these plains of shimmering, shifting colours. Nothing until now, for now there is the book.
Rothko's death and the terms of his will led Kate and, later, Christopher into a thicket of legal barbed wire. They fought what they saw as a vicious conspiracy to exploit their father's gift. A sick man Ð he had suffered an aneurism two years before his death Ð he had succumbed to the blandishments of a group of friends who, via the Marlborough gallery and the Rothko Foundation, intended to snatch the cream of his work from the family. The courts, finally, backed the family. The children got their share of the paintings and the foundation donated many more to the National Gallery in Washington. By the mid-1980s, though victorious, Christopher was disgusted by the whole affair. He loathed what he had seen of the art world and he had grown tired of ploughing through papers. So when, in 1988, their collection manager, Marion Kahan, sent him a copy of the typescript she had discovered among the Rothko papers, he took no notice.
"Marion had heard rumours about a book he had written, and she Xeroxed these papers and sent it to my sister and I. I was in graduate school. Kate was a doctor and her life was very busy. I don't know if she ever looked at it very carefully. With the estate I'd gone through God knows how many legal documents. Then this big stack of paper came and it sat in my apartment for months. I finally took it out to have a look at it. It was lots of typed pages with lots of handwritten notes and crossings-out. I put it away again."
Later he was contacted by some scholars who were planning a book on his father's writing. They asked Christopher if there was anything apart from the few lectures he had given. Christopher picked up the typescript again. "I started looking properly this time and I thought, 'Oh my God, there really is a book here.'"
