Rothko's paintings make some people cry partly because he painted them to be met that way: huge, hung low, seen from close, in dim rooms. Why it happens to one visitor and not the next is not settled.
Rothko's best-known canvases are tall and wall-filling, covered by two or three soft-edged rectangles of color stacked one above another. They hold no figure, no landscape and no story. Visitors have reported weeping in front of them for decades.
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The tears were his evidence, not his goal, and he did not trust the explanation most people reach for first. In 1956 the writer Selden Rodman, who was collecting conversations with artists for a book, talked with him in New York. Rothko told him: "If you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" In the same exchange he said, "I'm not an abstractionist."
That is a strange thing for a painter of blurred rectangles to say, and it leaves a plain question open: if the colors are not what moves people, what is?
What did Rothko want those tears to prove?
That the feeling he put into a canvas reached someone else. Rodman printed the exchange in Conversations with Artists. In it, Rothko says: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
That many people broke down and cried in front of his work, he added, showed that he had communicated what he meant.
What he meant is stated more plainly in a line Tate quotes. He was, he said, "interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." Ecstasy sits on that list beside doom, and nothing he said sorts the tears into grief and joy.
The saddest paintings in art history usually show the cause of the sorrow: a deathbed, a mourner, a ruin. Mark Rothko painted none of that. Whatever the tears answered to, he put it in the scale and the light of the canvas, and he needed the viewer close enough to receive it.
What You'll Discover
Why he hung the canvases so low.
What he borrowed from Michelangelo.
Why the restaurant murals went to London.
What people report inside his Houston chapel.