Christopher Rothko Has Spent 30 Years Connecting With His Father Through the Work

The Monastery of San Marco in Florence was originally established in the 13th Century; the monks’ cells of the convent were decorated by Fra Angelico in the 1440s. Each small cell has a single window oriented away from direct sunlight. The diffused, soft light was specifically designed for meditation and prayer. Each cell is adorned with a devotional fresco that matches the single arch-topped window in size and shape. In one cell, alongside his Noli me Tangere (Touch Me Not) depicting Jesus speaking to Mary Magdalena after the Resurrection, now hangs Mark Rothko’s shimmering pink and orange Untitled, from 1958. A fitting place to hang a Rothko, who said, “self-expression is boring,” and that he was painting his “not self.”

“Rothko in Florence,” mounted in San Marco, Palazzo Strozzi and the Biblioteca Laurenziana designed by Michelangelo, is a 15-year labor of love undertaken by Rothko’s son, Christopher. Co-curated with Elena Geuna, it places 73 works in dialogue with these three ancient architectures, with the old and the new illuminating each other. Speaking with Christopher about the exhibition, he pointed out how important it would have been for his father due to the strong connection he felt to the culture and place: “To feel the work resonate as you walk through Palazzo Strozzi, such a beautiful, quiet space, and the more focused interaction you get at the other two venues—it’s very personal, and very special.” What follows is our conversation with the Color Field movement master’s son, lightly edited.

Observer: You started the Rothko Foundation 20 years ago?

Christopher Rothko: There isn’t a Rothko Foundation anymore. The Rothko Foundation, which was independent, conserved the works and gifted them to museums, closed in 1986. My sister and I have two private collections, but we function like a foundation. We support exhibitions; we support research. We try to loan generously.

I covered the National Museum show in D.C., Rothko’s “Paintings on Paper.” I met with Adam Greenhalgh, the curator and lead author of the catalogue raisonné. How’s that going?

This has been a long process, but since Adam’s taken over, it’s really accelerated and just gotten much deeper. They actually closed the research on the catalogue a couple of months ago, in preparation for the print volume coming out in the fall of ’27. My sister and I have probably spent more time working with our father’s works on paper than anything else over the last 50 years.

To see the works unframed, to sense the ripple effect of the paper and then that last room with his quote “Silence is so accurate” hung over the luminescent pink and lilac, Untitled (1969), one of his last works. Thinking about it now still gives me chills.

For many years, that painting hung across from my writing chair. I always hang something inspirational there to fire my words.

How did you choose which paintings went with the Fra Angelicos?

My father didn’t talk a lot about his artwork, but he’s on record twice talking about San Marco and how important it is. I went in with the thought that maybe we would do a Rothko show, and maybe they would be open to some kind of juxtaposition. The amazing thing about Rothko paintings is that they talk. Three of those paintings chose themselves in five minutes. And I knew the three Fra Angelicos they would be paired with. I wanted smaller paintings. I didn’t want to try and shout down Fra Angelico. I wanted something that was going to be scaled to the room, not just color, it was texture. I wanted something that had that powdery, soft texture of a fresco. For me, it’s the soul of the exhibition, if not the heart.

It all comes together as a feeling of reverence. Inspired. Was it hard to procure the space?

Yes, they don’t do this. I think they once before allowed an artist to do a one-day or two-day installation. In the Laurenziana Library, never. This was the first time. I was in discussions with them for 15 years, and they were open to the idea. Even though Firenze has so many tourists, they need more visitation to balance their budget. San Marco is my first destination, but it’s just that little bit outside of the central part of Firenze, and tourists don’t make the jump. I can’t say enough about what amazing partners Palazzo Strozzi have been. It’s the perfect venue for doing this retrospective, which is so focused on the interaction with the history of Florence.

Did you choose San Marco because your father wrote about it in his book, The Artist’s Reality?

Absolutely. This is abstract work. It’s not like he’s making landscapes of Florence. My father talked so little about his work, that when he talks about some place being an important influence for him, I take him really seriously. Besides a brief trip back and forth to London when his retrospective opened at the Whitechapel, he only travelled three other times for multiple months and the entire focus was Italy. He loved ancient Rome, the Roman and Greek temple sites, Tuscany, Umbria. He was looking at art, sun up to sundown, in churches, monasteries, museums.

Both yours and Geuna’s essays in the catalogue for the show are excellent. In yours, you write about the architecture of Firenze and that focus in selecting the paintings.

Particularly all of his drawings for the mural series. He’s working out ideas, in black and white. He’s looking at structure, at forms that have solidity, forms that create their own structure. Within the classic works that we displayed, like the Whitney’s Four Darks in Red, is like the Vesuvius painting, but it also has a solidity. I think about him going to Rome where you turn a corner, and you’re in a 19th-century piazza, and turn another corner and there’s this architectural site. You see three levels of Roman history, and then two things built upon that. I see those layers in some of these paintings. Then the early works evoke European buildings—he’s not yet been to Europe but he’s at the Metropolitan all the time. He’s at the cloisters; he’s looking in books all the time.

The subway series in the show are structural, even the figures are structural. And the five colored, tempera sketches for the Seagram series are evocative, having the essence of his abstracts.

In some ways, they have more of a painterly quality than the murals themselves, designed to create an atmosphere. Here he’s working with a brush. I love these five works. The two are at the Laurenziana, and then three in the small rooms at Palazzo Strozzi. It’s the juxtaposition of the more dramatic, more iconic work that creates a room.

When you enter the last room, it feels like you’re in a chapel, which is uplifting, ethereal, historical.

It’s always a surprise for people, especially after seeing the black and grey canvases, a natural narrative. He’s so depressed, painting in black and grey, and at the same time, he’s painting sort of terracottas. It was Arturo Galansino’s idea, the director, to make a semi-octagonal space with niches. It evokes so much of the history, and the way Rothko would have been looking at art in Florence.

Was it difficult to procure all the work? Some are in your collection and your sister’s, but others are in museums and in private hands.

It’s always hard. We only received a couple of private loans that were not family collection, but museums in Europe and New York were very generous. The National Gallery is always our partner. They received 90 percent of the Rothko Foundation’s collection—they’ve taken as their mandate to support exhibitions. They’ve been amazing partners for 40 years.

Are they and you planning another Rothko anytime soon?

There’s not been a major retrospective in the U.S. in 40 years. And New York hasn’t had a show in 27 years. I think the last two exhibitions in Paris and this one in Firenze have shown that people are still very excited about Rothko. But the difference now, some 25 years later, is how difficult it is to get private lenders. It’s ironic because the paintings are so fully insured, whether they’re worth $40 million or $80 million, whatever that means, they’re fully insured. But psychologically, for a collector to loan something that has almost a nine-figure price tag, it’s daunting.

The recent auction at Sotheby’s—a Rothko went for $86+ million. Are you shocked by that?

I have very mixed feelings. I don’t want the market to go down, but it puts a lot of focus on the value of the painting in dollars—the value of the painting and how it affects you when you see it in the museum. And it makes it very hard to do exhibitions because the insurance costs are just astronomical, as they should be if a work costs that much. It makes it very complicated.

There aren’t that many museums that can afford that, not a large-scale retrospective of classic paintings.

The four big New York museums, MoMA and the Met, along with the Guggenheim and the Whitney, which would be more of a stretch. It’s in my mind that we have to start thinking about it. It’s been a long time.

Seeing the “Paintings on Paper” at the National in 2023 was important because it showed this large body of work chronologically, where you could see the artist’s evolution. You have a deeper understanding of their work, their process and their struggle.

Yes. With my father, it was painting by painting. People think he develops his signature style and then just starts manufacturing those. He starts over every painting and it’s a new question to answer and new materials, new shapes, new forms, new colors. It’s not automatic. And the road to get there was certainly not automatic. I have said multiple times that I would love someone to present an idea to me that would be a compelling way of hanging a retrospective that isn’t chronological, because I’m open to doing something new. But, process. That got driven home to me when I was 15, seeing the retrospective in 1978 at the Guggenheim. You walk that spiral and you look across and you see what’s coming, and you see it all unfolding. It’s powerful. It’s a history lesson. You see the artist’s language developing. Not just with Rothko, obviously, with lots of other artists as well.

The drawings in the Strozzi exhibit are all from 1962, all the same size. Did your father leave many sketches? Did he intend to show them?

He had sketchbooks, but not formal ones, just places where he jotted down notes, the occasional little three-inch drawing. He makes ink washes over a couple of them that feel like more finished works. It’s never like a worked-out plan for a painting. The paintings happen. It’s experiential for him as well as for the viewer. We don’t know if he meant to show them. We’ll find these old gallery catalogs, and they’ll list all the canvases and then, say, 10 drawings. The documentation is just not nearly as thorough as the paintings. Of works on paper, there are around 2,500 works, including many figurative sketches and small still lifes, and about 1,000 paintings on paper, like what you saw in Washington, from all periods. A really substantial body of work.

Have you seen all of these yourself?

Yes, basically all the sketches, with a few exceptions, are in our collection. That’s my sister and me, or the National Gallery. I’m pretty sure that division happened before I was so actively involved with the Rothko legacy. My sister is 13 years older than me, so there was a lot of stuff that she did before I was able to do anything.

What made you jump on board? You were working as a psychotherapist.

The first thing was having gotten my PhD, having had my own life. I don’t feel like it was forced upon me. I was very insistent that I was going to be my own person. Not long after I started practicing, there were a bunch of exhibitions that happened mostly in Europe. They were relatively young curators who hadn’t worked with my father’s work before and were very eager to engage Kate and me in the conversations. Kate was a parent of three and a relatively young physician, so I ended up doing the lion’s share of that interaction and finding myself really enjoying it, knowing more than I realized I knew. I stopped allotting as many hours to my psychotherapeutic work and was doing more on the Rothko stuff in the early 2000s. I went into college thinking I was going to be a writer, and worked as a music critic. But I wanted to write more, and the early Rothko writing offered me that opportunity. But at this point, I’ve written too many Rothko essays. I think I’m really done.

After 25 years, how has your relationship with the work changed, and your relationship with your father and with the artist?

Yeah, there are many layers to that. I really started formally working with the work in 1998 or 1999. There were requests for exhibition loans, exhibitions, constant usages for books, magazines, what have you. My sister was doing all of that, but increasingly involved me. My sister is forever my hero for dealing with everything for such a long time. Being hands-on with the work has allowed me to get this overall sense of his career, his materials, his styles, but also how he put himself into the work and how he interacted with the work. It was deeply personal, although never autobiographical. Editing and publishing his book of writings (The Artist’s Reality) was a huge part of that, since the manuscript was not finished. Some chapters were pretty clear, and some weren’t. There were four drafts, and it wasn’t clear which was the last draft. It’s pretty heavy philosophical stuff, and it took three or four reads until I got it. It was a conversation that I never had with my father. It gave me a huge insight into how his mind worked and how he thought about art and how critical he felt art was for society and what the role of the artist was in driving forward ideas and the sort of conscience of society. That was in 2000, and I worked on that into 2004. That deepened my appreciation for what he was doing and how seriously he was trying to solve these questions, which is what he’s doing on these trips to Europe, too. Trips to Italy, he’s looking at these Renaissance artists, and he’s not just saying, oh, that’s the most beautiful thing. He’s saying, I see Fra Angelico trying to work out some of the same questions I’m trying to work out. He’s really having a dialogue with them as if they were colleagues at the next easel.

How has that changed your relationship as his son?

He was in my life actively until I was 6 years old, when he died. He was not down at the Cedar Bar drinking every night. He was home a lot. He was really a family man. He was very devoted to me, so I did get to know him in an essential way. I just didn’t get to learn a lot of the details. I didn’t get to have the sort of older child’s conversation with him. I’ve gotten to know him, as other people have to get to know him, through the artwork. I have a foundational understanding and knowledge of him, internalized, that supports that. If you’re really dedicated to getting to know Rothko, the artwork is the best way to know him. I’ve devoted the last 30 years of my life to working with his artwork. His artwork speaks to me in some way that is very personal. I find myself often deeply moved, even when I’m having to make sure all the paintings have shown up in the crates and it’s hung exactly straight. But at the end of the day, the most moving part is hanging an exhibition, because you feel the power of the works in that room, and you have an opportunity to have a conversation with him. His work is all about the conversation with the viewer. My conversation is a little different, maybe a little deeper. I’m very grateful to be able to do this work because, yes, it’s given me a much deeper relationship with him, even if it’s ever so slightly indirect.

I find the more I study an artist, writing about them, the more the work deepens, the richer it gets. I don’t ever feel like you can come to the end of that because a human being is so complex. The work should feel fresh every time you see it, say something new to you, or you’re not really engaging. With art, how open you are is how much you receive it. And the thing that’s different about Rothko is he almost insists on that—you have to open yourself. Other paintings you can go through quickly. There are people who don’t really like Rothko. I think they just don’t want that kind of experience because it’s intense. You spoke about your first time alone in the Rothko Chapel, how uncomfortable you were. It was only until you surrendered that you were going to be able to experience it. There’s so much hype around Rothko, and still his work can have a profound effect. You said that your father was more concerned with where and how we are than who we are. I don’t really understand that.

What I think I’m trying to get to is he’s engaging with you in terms of your immediate experience. Who you are is a larger question that evolves over time. The where and how you are—it’s like he’s taking your temperature. Those paintings take your temperature. I call them emotional barometers. They are having you check: Where am I right now? What am I feeling? What is this evoking in me? How does it change what I’m thinking about? And that can happen with anybody. You don’t have to be a certain sort of person. It can happen with anybody. I think that’s probably what I was saying.

That’s what intimacy is. It has to be right now. How much you surrender now. Can you talk about his techniques, his materials, his process? Do you have actual information about that? He had assistants.

He only had assistants at the end of his career. He was really in bad health the last couple of years. When he was making all those works on paper, he had assistants who would tape them up to a board and may have helped with some preparation of paints. But he really painted on his own. He didn’t want people around. He used very unorthodox techniques, materials and combinations of materials that artists hadn’t done before or didn’t typically do. He mixed his own paints using powdered pigments and a variety of binders, sometimes using whole egg rather than just egg yolk, rabbit skin glue, linseed oil.

When did he switch from oil to acrylic?

In 1967, he had an aneurysm that nearly killed him and wasn’t able to paint for about three months. His doctor told him he couldn’t paint anymore. The legend has it that they had multi-hour arguments and finally agreed to small-scale works on paper only. It was then that he turned to acrylic paint for the first time. The 250 late papers are in acrylic. Then he says, the hell with that, and makes much bigger paintings, paints on canvas again in the last year. The whole Black on Grey series is acrylic.

You can’t even tell they are acrylic. In the play Red, there are many quotes by your father. Are they accurate? In the play, he has an assistant.

The play is biographical but not particularly accurate. He had an assistant for the Seagram series who became a dear friend who really helped him create the stretchers, helped create the pulley system, create the walls. The assistant was able to mock up the Seagram room. But he never had a daily assistant. What is accurate is the struggle about how do you deal with success? How do you make a decision between what you feel is right for your work and more money than you’ve ever seen before? How do you gauge what is really going to take you that next step and what is not going to be true to yourself? That is accurate.

Where did all those quotes come from if he didn’t write very much?

Introductions to catalogues, a few articles for Tiger’s Eye and Possibilities, short-lived art magazines in the ’40s, encounters with art critics that he’d run into on the street and the art critic would go home and write it down. He had a reputation as someone who purposely cultivated an aura of mystery. I think he just wanted to paint and be left alone. So he stopped talking about his artwork.

What do you think he would have thought about his paintings going for $86+ million?

I think he’d be really worried that people were missing the point. If he knew that groups of collectors were getting together to invest in his painting as an investment, then parked it in a warehouse, he’d be really upset. He was very clear that he wanted to make a living as an artist, which he couldn’t do until his mid-50s. He thought artists should be well compensated. He considered it a real job.

I recently interviewed Musa Mayer, Philip Guston’s daughter. She said she and her parents went every year to the Rothkos’ for Christmas dinner.

Yeah, Musa said she liked visiting our family because we were normal. My father kept bankers’ hours, 8 to 6, seven days a week. He had a reputation for being hyper intellectual, edgy. He wasn’t interested in the comic and art about art, but in his personal life, he was very sociable and very warm-hearted.

So, you’re not going to curate anymore and don’t want to write any more essays. You’ve invested so much of yourself in his legacy and in honoring his work. What do you want to focus on now?

I want to make sure that the archive is in really good shape. And I will be available for questions from younger curators who will work with my father’s work. I’ve been on the Rothko Chapel board in Houston for 23 years, and I’m a firm, passionate believer in the Rothko Chapel’s mission focused on human rights, social justice, interfaith tolerance and dialogue. We’ve done a huge restoration and enhancement of the grounds, building new buildings, so the chapel isn’t functioning as our programming center all the time. And music. It’s actually my first love before art. I think that was probably true for my father, too.

Your father liked opera and classical music, right?

Yes, opera and classical music. Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.

Who was his favorite?

I think it was Mozart and his good friend Mozart and his close brother Mozart. And then there was his cousin Mozart. He was really a Mozart fanatic. That was the be-all and end-all for him. And he loved opera. I remember arguing with him when I was around 5 because he thought The Magic Flute was the greatest opera ever written. I told him Don Giovanni was the greatest opera ever written. And you know what? I’d still have that fight. He was a music fanatic, and didn’t own a record player until in his 60s. He just listened to the radio.

I’m a huge classical music lover, and that’s almost entirely his fault. We would sit together when I was very young and listen to records. My mother was a jazz lover so I’m also a big jazz fan. And my sister was listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan. I’m a singer, and I would love to do more singing. I would love to write about music, but everybody’s a music critic now, an internet critic. I had a wonderful mentor in high school who was a huge fan of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. There are ensembles I’ve sung with that do early music. I’ve sung lots of romantic music that has a sense of purity, clean lines, contrapuntal over vertical writing that I think appeals to a certain sensibility, especially the medieval music that moves me tremendously. I sing with a choir now, and it’s extremely rewarding—Music of Viva, here in New York City. I also want to read more. I’m a huge Samuel Beckett fan. It’s his brand of existentialism that I connect to when I’m looking at Rothko paintings.

I really appreciate how authentic and available you are. That quality reminds me of your father’s paintings. There’s a delicacy about what you do, a reverence, but at the same time so open.

Thank you, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say that. I really enjoyed this process. I feel you really understand my father’s work. You asked me questions that spoke to me; that shows you are not only a sensitive soul, but really plugged into how the work functions and how we view it.

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