Artist/Maker
Mark Rothko
(American, born Latvia, 1903 – 1970)
Untitled (The Subway)
1937
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm)
Framed: 33 × 45 in. (83.8 × 114.3 cm)
Framed: 33 × 45 in. (83.8 × 114.3 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City
IL2021.51.80
Mark Rothko emigrated with his family from tszarist Russia to the United States in 1913. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and, after two years studying at Yale University, moved to New York City to enroll in the Art Students League. It was there that Rothko absorbed the Social Realist philosophies promoted by such dominant faculty members as Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, and Reginald Marsh and accordingly the Russian émigré began to pursue scenes of everyday city life. Among his favorite themes was the subway.
This untitled painting is one of many in which Rothko depicts New York City subway stations and their commuters. The image of a drab and windowless subterranean space in which inexpressive figures wait, isolated from one another, for the train seems expressive of modern alienation in the metropolis, the tedium of the daily commute, and the somber mood of Depression-era New York. Although loosely brushed, it resonates in tenor and topic with the hard-edged documentary photographs of the Depression taken by Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn under the auspices of the Federal Art Project and Farm Security Administration. Rothko in fact created this painting, along with Untitled (Two Women at the Window), for the Treasury Relief Art Project—a related division of the WPA under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program.
While the painting satisfies the federal program’s preference for realistic subjects, Rothko seems to exploit the scene as a platform for exploring perception and pictorial space. Foreshortened subway tracks recede steeply toward a dark tunnel. The lines of track ties—repeated by rows of ceiling beams and pillars—plot the extension into space with almost mathematical precision. Even the commuters, seated roughly stepwise on a double-sided bench, map spatial depth. Yet the station platform and wall read as broad screens of earth-toned colors that resist perspectival recession and appear to lift and tilt toward the picture plane. The steel gray rails of the track can be read as reaching upward across the canvas as much as slicing into the distance. And the dark-clad commuter between the two pillars seems less to inhabit an illusionistic expanse than to be locked into a gridded surface.
The contrast between extremes of flatness and depth transforms the everyday space of the subway into a charged visual ground. The painting is an early work—created before 1940, when the artist changed his name from the given Markus Rothkowitz in order to counter growing anti-Semitism in the United States and to signal a shift in his artistic identity. Yet already this work departs from then-dominant modes of realism and presages the flattened rectangles and muted hues of his mature abstractions. The renowned modernist would break from figuration entirely to explore abstract color fields and the contemplation that their perceptual experience can induce for the patient viewer.
COMMUNITY VOICE
I never thought I would come across a New York City scene by Rothko, so I jumped on the opportunity to acquire this piece. When he was a WPA painter, Rothko painted the Subway Series. In the distance you can see the artist’s future coming. The red light on the train is a harbinger of things to come.
Elie Hirschfeld
New York City real estate developer
ClassificationsPAINTINGS
Collections
- Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
