Art Review

MARK ROTHKO: Reflection

At Museum of Fine Arts,

465 Huntington Ave., through July 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Mark Rothko taught children art at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center for more than 20 years. He was scraping by as an artist and needed to supplement his income. His students called him “Rothkie.’’ He marveled at their fearlessness. “Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey,’’ he wrote. 

He did not seek to harness that pure spirit with the numbing grammar of technique and history. Instead he shepherded it, bolstering what he called his students’ “emotional excitement.’’

Rothko strove for that childlike clarity in his own art. Forget the clutter of theory and signification. Forget pictures themselves; they simply denote and narrate. The flat canvas, modernists believed, had a brash, naked clarity that pictures lacked.

For Rothko, a painting had to be a direct transmission: his soul to the painting, the painting’s soul to us.

The small, sterling “Mark Rothko: Reflection’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts spotlights 11 paintings made throughout his career, all on loan from the National Gallery of Art, in Washington. One radiant work from the MFA’s own collection at the gallery entrance exactly conveys the directness Rothko sought. 

It’s a Rembrandt. The artist was a favorite of Rothko’s.

“Artist in his Studio,’’ made around 1628, when Rembrandt was in his early 20s, depicts a painter in the shadows contemplating a large canvas. It leaps 300 years or more into the future, right onto Rothko’s doorstep, with the clean edge of that canvas incandescent in the dusky light, a Barnett Newman zip sluicing down the middle of an Old Master painting. 

We can’t see the canvas — it faces away from us. The pragmatic among us will assume the light reflects from a window. But could the painting be emitting light? Does it have that numinous a presence?

Yes, Rothko might say, avowedly yes. 

The early Rothko that hangs beside “Artist in his Studio’’ harmonizes with the Rembrandt, albeit weakly — that’s what you get when you sing alongside a choir of angels. He was around 35, still a decade away from his signature style. “Thru the Window’’ (1938-’39) depicts Rothko gazing in upon an overturned mock-up of a stage set, with a lithesome model on the left opposite a red canvas and easel. 

It’s all a bit stilted, a bit self-consciously Freudian, a bit removed — although the red of the canvas nearly sears a hole through the mannered scene, and the bizarre, miniaturized architecture reveals Rothko’s apprehension that space has its own psychological charge.

His next surrealist gambit was automatic painting, aimed at evoking the symbology of ancient myths. The one automatic work here loops and dances, but it still has a self-conscious air. It’s not his best of this ilk, which shiver with line and translucent shapes, but still function like pictures to be decoded.

Rothko finally made contact when, inspired by his friend Clyfford Still, he leaned into color, painting fuzzy, hovering forms with layers and layers of thin washes. These were no longer pictures, no longer inscriptions of personal or cultural mythology. They breathed.

In “No. 10’’ (1949) three registers hover against an ocher ground: yellow and honey at the bottom, green in the middle, and a burning red at the top with a veiled window to a mellow sun. It’s a tease, this painting, stepping back coolly, then smiling and warming you up. It’s hard to resist.

Still, when you get to Rothko’s later works, look back on “No. 10’’ and you will know it to be merely a flirt. The later paintings are steadfast; they accept. The passages of forest green and ember red on deep mauve in “No. 1’’ (1961) are like heartbeats — unhurried, present. 

With these paintings, Rothko cannily narrowed his space. He didn’t care for great vistas, but the pure flatness of modernism wasn’t quite right, either. He wanted a space you could step into, so shallow it feels intimate, but on a large enough scale that it envelops. Then you almost sense against your skin the paint’s textures like cocoa powder or slate, its drips and vapors.

Next come the black paintings. Color is candy; these are the paintings the casual viewer will walk past. Color is sugar; these paintings are sustenance. Stepping into their shallow space, into complete darkness, is like entering the quiet hollows of your own mind — the quiet we mechanically avoid — not knowing exactly what you’ll find.

These paintings anticipate the ones the artist made for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston. That project, Rothko hoped, would exemplify all that he had worked for: art as an encounter with the transcendent.

Rothko committed suicide in 1970, before the chapel opened. Some attribute these dark paintings to his ill health, alcoholism, and depression. He did once list a preoccupation with death as a crucial ingredient for art.

But there’s nothing depressing about them. They brew with hidden variety waiting to be found. They insist that you feel your way into them. 

In “No. 7,’’ (1964) a black square floats in a black field. The interior square looks darker than its background at the top, lighter at the bottom — where, black as it is, it shines. Groping your way in the dark is a private, maybe fraught endeavor, all senses alert. What will you find?

The black paintings reprise the glow of the canvas in Rembrandt’s “The Artist in his Studio.’’ They are not, like many paintings, merely objects to be looked at. They emanate a presence, inanimate but alive, nuanced but clear. It almost feels as if they want to get to know you. You will certainly want to get to know them.

MARK ROTHKO: Reflection

At Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., through July 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.