Automatic Art and the Appeal of Surrealism

Mark Rothko, Untitled (1940)

Mark Rothko, Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942)

A change in Rothko’s works started in the 1940’s, when he abandoned the bleak urban figurist works of his youth and instead began to develop a more Surrealist style. Partly a response to his readings of Freud and Nietzsche and partly in reaction to the world crises of the era, Rothko was inspired by the automatic drawing method of the Surrealists, in which one would try to exert no conscious control over what one was drawing, to create looser and more abstract works, a step away from the more controlled Figurist scenes of his earlier period.

Rothko’s Untitled from 1944-5 (left top) is a characteristic piece from this period. The piece, which vaguely resembles a face from far away, is a watercolour depicting several swirling, abstract patterns, which appear almost amoebic or biomorphic in nature. Indeed, there is distinct phallic and vulvic imagery in the piece.

This move towards more pictographic and almost cave-painting like elements in Rothko’s work was coupled with a fascination with myths, both classical and Biblical, which was likely also based on his readings of the psychoanalytic thinkers and of Nietzsche and their ideas of the universal spirit of myths. Several of Rothko’s Surrealist works in fact bear titles that recall Greek mythology or the Bible, for example 1942’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia (left bottom). In this piece, Iphigenia, represented by an elongated figure in a spherical black dress, cowers from the reaching hands of her father Agemmemnon at right. As a story which at its heart is about the casualities of war, Iphigenia's sacrifice would have been an appealing subject for Rothko during the mid-years of World War II.

In The Artist’s Reality, a book Rothko wrote during the 1940’s but which was only published posthumously, he claims that modern art must find a way to reinvigorate the myths of the ancients, either by “fall[ing] back upon the allegories of the past which have used a form of symbolism” or by “evol[ving] a series of new anecdotal myths which will give a universal significance." In Rothko’s works from the 1940s, I believe he tries this latter method, evolving his own series of archaic-looking symbols and elements in order to find a new mode of expression.