The philosopher Jean‐Paul Sartre, unquestionably affected by the atrocities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, publishes an essay in 1946, a year after the war, that rejects the idea of a God. He claims in his essay, “Existence precedes Essence”, that “we”, the existentialists, reject the idea of a God and that man is solely responsible for what he is. How could a God that we call all‐good, all-benevolent and all‐powerful allow the systematic mass destruction of life? That was a question that people were struggling with, and many of them found their answer in Sartre’s view of there being no proof of God. Others still held onto the idea of a divine being despite all the horrors that occur in the world—even some who were Jewish. There were two Jewish painters of that period who sought the spiritual in their art—Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman—who were part of a group of artists that came to define what Abstract Expressionism would be in America. They both worked in the sense—through the existential philosophy of Sartre and the Jewish concept of tikkun olam—that if our existence has an ethical significance, so will everything that we subjectively create; this is what gives to the personal some value for humankind at large.
The Abstract Expressionist work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were the most original response to the Holocaust because it was not based on overtly anecdotal and figurative art with clear socio‐political messages. For example, many paintings of Marc Chagall have direct references to apocalyptic themes by way of Jewish imagery and iconography. Rothko and Newman also differed from other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock who represented the chaos of a mid‐century America with his disturbing clash of color and forceful, rapid, impulsive brush strokes and distressed line. Instead, Newman and Rothko chart a different course: they re‐create reality, re‐order chaos, restore a center to the broken universe. Interestingly, the Jews among the Abstract Expressionists chose to assert the restorative intention of their paintings and I believe that this is influenced by the Jewish idea of tikkun olam.
Tikkun olam is a phrase that comes from Kabbalah (the mystical aspect of Judaism) that literally translates as “repairing the world”. Kabbalah offers a mystical explanation for the creation of the universe. The doctrine claims that in creating the world, God used too much energy and benevolence, thus shattering the finite vessels that God had created. (Those “vessels” included all finite beings, inanimate and animate, vegetable, animal, and especially, human.) When Jews fulfill their obligations under God’s commandments, they literally help fix the shattered world. Jews thus have immense power— a comforting message to Jews faced by the horrors of the Holocaust—for even if they are often helpless victims in their lives on earth, in the celestial realm, they can do nothing less than fix God and the world God created.
Barnett Newman was a reader of Jewish mysticism, who gave biblical names to several paintings—Abraham (1949), Covenant (1949), and Joshua (1950)—was most open and most responsive to the events and aftermath of the war. Newman is most famous for his stripe paintings—one or more vertical stripes on a single field of color—that were in part a response to the Holocaust as well as to the founding of the State of Israel (1948) as suggested by the stripes on Israel’s flag. According to Kabbalah, the world was created when God contracted into himself in order to create the space for the world. Then God sent out a ray of light that set “the cosmic process in motion.” One such painting, titled Onement, III, shows a single stripe down the length of the canvas which represents that first ray of light, as well as the first human form. It was the moment of creation. Newman’s biographer, Thomas Hess, described Newman’s thinking: The artist, Newman pointed out, must start like God, with chaos, the void… Newman’s first move is an act of division, straight down, creating an image. The image… reenacts God’s primal gesture… Newman has taken his image of Genesis, of the creative act, of the artist as God.* Newman had given himself the power—godlike, one could argue—to declare himself as the creator of something out of nothing. This was the existential assertion of the power of the self and the act of self‐creation.
Mark Rothko was also quite familiar with Jewish culture and tradition. Mark Rothko, born as Marcus Rothkowitz, was a child of immigrants, and he had several years of orthodox religious training in his hometown in Lativa (He changed his name in 1940 to Rothko to make it less Jewish‐sounding for fear of being deported by the Nazis). When he immigrated to America in 1913, he spent his first years in a close‐knit Jewish community in Portland, Oregon and moved to New York later in life. He taught art at the Brooklyn Jewish Center from 1929 to 1946, which housed a conservative congregation. He also taught at a Jewish school in Queens, in the late 1930s. Mark Rothko, then, was always connected to the Jewish community, so it is impossible to believe that he was unaware of Jewish matters.
Mark Baigel, an art historian, argues that Mark Rothko was so traumatized by the Holocaust that the large, rectangular forms so often seen his work are rather derived from the large open graves that he saw in photographs after the end of the war. One could see, however, that his work still holds a spiritual optimism. My favorite painting of his that I saw at MOCA, titled No. 12 (Black on Dark Sienna on Purple) and dated 1960, offers this optimism. The frameless canvas is heroic in size, as if it would extend itself to the far corners of the universe. It has a very calm, stable sensibility reinforced by his broad bands of hue that recede and approach. The viewer is enveloped into the painting and is drawn to an image that asserts itself as a symbol of oneness, of wholeness. The common theme of his work, the reordering, recreation of the world on the canvas on a heroic scale suggests a visual messianism for a fragmented world. Surely, this restorative sensibility is what prompted to decorate a simple white chapel in Houston, Texas— named the Rothko Chapel—with only a series of Rothko canvases to create a meditative, spiritual ambiance.
The aspirations of Abstract Expressionist painters like Rothko and Newman were messianic, salvational, heroic and humanistic—by working the idea of social responsibility of the artist to a form of pure internal coherence. Their work does not echo the world torn apart by horrifying technologies and exploited by humans. It, instead, echoes the world in its original Divinely created form—and as it can become again only if and when humans direct our efforts to restoring it to perfection as commanded in tikkun olam.
References
* Baigel, Matthew. Jewish American Artists and the Holocaust.
Online References from Wikipedia:
Kabbalah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
Tikkun Olam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam
Mark Rothko: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
Barnett Newman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman
Primary Source:
Mark Rothko. No. 12 (Black on Dark Sienna on Purple), 1960
Museum of Contemporary Art
Barnett Newman. Onement, III, 1949