Christopher Rothko on Preserving His Father’s Legacy

With long silver hair and a sharp suit, he could pass for an ageing rockstar—or even British art dealer Ivor Braka. Nevertheless, Christopher Rothko does bear a striking resemblance to his father, the legendary Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko.

Christopher speaks in a considered manner with soft tones, inherited perhaps from his father. Along with his sister, Kate, he has dedicated much of his life to nurturing his father's legacy. And as he discusses Rothko's desire to 'raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry', it becomes clear how well placed he is to curate the artist's first major survey in France since 1999.

Christopher Rothko has curated a comprehensive retrospective at Bernard Arnault's Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (18 October 2023–2 April 2024) with the Foundation's artistic director Suzanne Pagé, whom he also partnered with back in 1999.

Rothko's previous retrospectives in Europe have mainly included works from the Family Collection and the Mark Rothko Foundation, he explains.

'These are easy paintings to get because we consider our collections essentially public. But I wanted to bring paintings that Europeans have never seen. So we have paintings from Utica, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Tempe, Arizona, as well as from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.'

Hunting down these paintings and securing them for public exhibitions is clearly something that Christopher feels very strongly about. The show includes the early painting, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea from 1944, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and has never before been loaned for an exhibition due to its historical significance.

'It's a painting of him and my mother shortly after they met. I grew up with that over my couch,' he explains. This, coupled with the tragedy of losing both his parents by the time he was just six years old, surely made it impossible for even MoMA to turn him down.

His eyes light up when discussing some of these works, including the 1962 painting No. 1, White and Red from Toronto, which he describes as his 'absolute favourite'.

He also recounts how he had never even seen No. 9/No. 5/No. 18 (1952) in the flesh before as the work has been in the same collection since 1971 after being sold by Marlborough Gallery.

'It's a spectacular painting and I'm very touched that they have agreed to lend,' he says.

It's equally moving to hear the presence of Rothko within the hanging of the show. 'My father was very sensitive to what his works needed, and he was very clear that he wanted it to be a personal interaction between the painting and viewer.'

'He wrote about this when he sent his paintings to the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961. He sent instructions for hanging the canvases low, near to the floor with lower lighting close enough together so they are in interaction with each other. So this is always where we start and then we listen to the paintings. They usually tell you when they're happy or they're not.'

It's touching to think of these objects as vessels through which Christopher Rothko can somehow communicate with his father. In his eyes, Rothko was a family man who taught his son how to play chess and bestowed upon him a love of music, which seems so crucial to not only the artist himself, but also his son's understanding of Rothko's practice.

His father described Mozart as 'smiling through tears' when composing—an exquisitely poignant interpretation that gives us a window into Rothko's psyche. Simple human emotions were the target for Rothko but he wanted viewers to question them to reveal the complexity of these emotional states, as well as the uneasiness and precariousness of our existence.

When Rothko died, the family lost the contents of his studio to his dealer, Marlborough Gallery. After years of court cases, they recovered some items including receipts for paint and a huge amount of turpentine used to thin the paints, further indicating how the artist would almost stain the canvas in many instances rather than applying layers of impasto.

'We still have some of the boards that he used to paint his works on paper, which is a very important part of his practice, especially later on,' Christopher adds. It's unsurprising when he suggests that his father would be appalled by not only the value of his works today, but the state of the art market as a whole. 'For him, if paintings become a commodity or a trophy, he would be very upset by that.'

Rothko's legacy remains in safe hands under the guidance and direction of his two children and this colossal show is evidence of the power his art still has to attract a new generation of admirers, while reminding the rest of us of his status as an unrivalled legend of abstract painting.