Dan's Papers - April 25, 2008

One of the great American painters of the 20th century was Mark Rothko. Like many others, such as de Kooning, Pollock and Gottleib, he is buried here on the East End.

Now members of his family, 38 years after his death, want to have his grave dug up and his remains moved to Westchester.

This would not be so important, if, say, Rothko were buried in East Hampton or Springs, where almost all the greats are buried. But he happens to be buried on the North Fork, specifically in a quiet little hamlet called East Marion, and his burial site is both a tourist attraction and a compliment to that quiet community. He was buried there because he loved East Marion, the people say. And East Marion wants him to stay. And that could happen, because Rothko's heirs need a court order to move him.

Rothko was born in 1903 in Latvia, which at that time was part of Czarist Russia. His father was the town pharmacist in the village of Daugavpils, and although the Jews in that community were not persecuted as they were in many other parts of Russia, the stories about persecution were not lost on Rothko's dad. In 1913, he and his wife and their two children took a steamship to New York City, where they settled.

Mark Rothko grew up as a brilliant yet troubled young man. He received a scholarship to Yale because he had the highest grades in his high school, but he didn't fit in there, and left after his second year, largely because Yale didn't like Jews and cancelled his scholarship after his first year. Rosko paid for his second year by doing menial jobs.

Rothko then embarked on a career as a painter, or more properly, a starving artist working with paints. He moved to Manhattan's Upper West Side where he made his studio and held many odd jobs, while he studied at the Art Student's League under Max Weber, and then along with Adolph Gottleib, Ilya Bolotowski, Ben-Zion, Lou Harris and others, apprenticed under Milton Avery.

Rothko came of age during the Great Depression. He married a girl named Edith in 1932 but it was a troubled relationship that finally came to an end in 1943. There were no children. He then went through many different periods with his painting, moving from still lifes and landscapes to abstract expressionism to something he called multi-forms. He once said that he was inspired by monsters and gods. He said the exhilarated tragic experience was the only form of art. Like many another fine painter in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he worked for the WPA and other Franklin D. Roosevelt-inspired work projects.

Two years after his divorce from Edith, he met and married a 22-year-old girl named Mary Alice Beistle, who became the love of his life. Two years later, he painted his masterpiece entitled "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea." It took him almost a year to complete. It established him as one of the major contemporary painters in America, along with the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others. Fortune magazine did a feature on him in 1950. His paintings were selling for $50,000 or more.

Perhaps the most remarkable commission he received was the offer he got to do all of the interior paintings for The Four Seasons, the celebrated restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagrams Building. It came in 1959. He was not crazy about this offer, but because Meis van der Rohe and Philip Johnson had accepted the job to design this extraordinary building at Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd, Rothko accepted.

People found it astonishing that he had waffled about this offer. It meant wealth and fame. What was the matter with him?

Nothing was the matter with him. He was, however, a malcontent, an intellectual and an anti-establishment figure. If this bad-boy persona were an act, people would soon see that he was not kidding.

Rothko spent three years painting the murals for The Four Seasons, revising his usual horizontal perspective to vertical ones, in keeping with the vertical soaring theme of the restaurant and the building. These murals, made of separate panels, were then mounted on the walls.

During the months that followed, Rothko and his beloved Mell, as she was called, toured Europe. On their way home on a steamship, he had a conversation with the publisher of Harpers Magazine, in which he said that the Seagrams murals were painted to be "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won't. People can stand anything these days."

Arriving back in New York a few weeks later, he and Mell ate at The Four Seasons, but left so upset by the restaurant's pretentious atmosphere that he refused to finish the last mural, returned his advance and went and took the paintings off the walls to keep for himself.

(These murals are now at the Tate in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Japan.)

If this defiant act was heartfelt, it also dramatically enhanced his reputation. He was soon courted by the wealthy art patron Dominique de Menil and with her help spent the next 15 years, on and off, painting a second masterpiece, which is today the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

In 1962, Pop Art came on the scene. Rothko called them "charlatans and young opportunists."

By the mid-1960s, Rothko was one of the most celebrated painters in America. Many of his paintings sold for millions. But by the middle of that decade, he was too ill to summon the huge amounts of physical energy needed to personally paint these giant canvases even though he was just in his early sixties. He had two assistants who did much of the painting.

In 1968, at his studio now at 157 East 69th Street, he suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, a result of high blood pressure, excessive weight gain and heavy smoking. He ignored all pleas for him to stop.

Later that year, he and his wife were separated. On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko's assistant, went into the kitchen of Rothko's apartment to find the painter dead on the floor with his wrists slashed. A razor was lying by his side. It was considered a suicide. A subsequent autopsy determined he had also taken an overdose of anti-depressants. He was 66.

A huge battle over Rothko's estate went on for the next 12 years. A few months before his death, Rothko had changed his will so that instead of leaving the majority of his legacy to his 19-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son, he would create a trust fund with many of his paintings so the trust could provide education and living expenses for struggling artists. Instead of doing that, however, the trustees basically fleeced the trust, by selling the paintings at rock bottom prices to the Marlboro Gallery, which then resold them at market value, sharing the proceeds with the trustees.

In 1982, a judge found that gallery, along with the three trustees, guilty. They were removed from their trusteeship and were fined $10 million for their negligence.

As for Rothko's body, it was taken after a brief funeral out to Long Island to the peaceful village of East Marion and buried in one of the three gravesites owned by a fellow painter named Theodoros Stamos, who Rothko considered one of his best friend. (Rothko stayed at Stamos's East Marion summer cottage on numerous occasions during the 1960s.) Unfortunately, later on, Stamos was one of the three trustees convicted of robbing Rothko's trust.

About four years ago, Rothko's children, now grown, wrote a letter to the trustees of the East Marion Cemetery asking their permission to disinter Rothko's body and bring it to another gravesite in Valhalla, New York. It was their intention to unite their father with their mother, Mell. They would be buried there side by side.

The trustees voted 6 to 1 to honor this request, and sent a letter to the heirs saying so. The exhumation could go forward without delay, but they said they would only approve the moving of the body if ordered to do so by a judge. They said later that they feared community objections. This would allow the community to sue if they chose.

As time went by after the vote, all of the trustees began to realize what this move might mean to East Marion. And soon, a majority of them were united against the move.

George Morton, the president of the cemetery association, said that he regrets voting with a majority when the first letter came in, and he has changed his mind.

"As far as I can see, he should stay right here," he said, adding that he had only recently realized that Rothko was such a famous artist.

"This is a place that was a comfort to him," said another trustee. "While I respect the family's wishes, I think he is where he belongs and where he should be."

The reference librarian at the nearest library to East Marion, the Floyd Memorial in Greenport, said that she is frequently asked by visitors how to get to Rothko's grave.

"He's been with us nearly 40 years. He should stay with us," said Nancy Poole, who is Secretary-Treasurer of the East Marion Cemetery Association.

Even those well beyond East Marion want Rothko to stay.

Christina Strassfield, curator of East Hampton's Guild Hall Museum, said, "So many of the first and second generation American artists made their homes out here. We consider them our heroes. Rothko belongs to the East End."

East Marion really does not have that much going for it. It has Truman Beach on the Sound. There is a motel, the Blue Dolphin. There are some woods, some wildlife, a few ponds and lakes. There's even a dam. About 740 residents live in East Marion.

It was founded by the English colonists in 1661. The colonists made friends with the Corchaug tribe who called the place in translation, Oysterponds, so the colonists called it that too. In 1836, Oysterponds became two communities, both of which wanted Oysterponds in the name. However, after some talk it was decided that neither would get it. The most easterly of the communities would be called Orient because it was at the very tip of the North Fork, and the more westerly part of the former Oysterponds would be called Marion after the Swamp Fox of the Revolutionairy War, General Francis Marion. Soon thereafter, however, it was learned there was a Marion already in use in upstate New York. So they wound up calling the place East Marion.

In 1880s, President Grover Cleveland was taken through East Marion in a carriage on his way to the Orient Point Inn for a weekend. Actress Sarah Bernhardt performed in nearby Greenport and James Fenimore Cooper wrote Sea Lions set in Orient. Three sisters in the Tuthill family, Cynthia, Lucretia and Asenath, were little people and accomplished seamstresses and in the mid 1800s, their brother Rufus built them a house with reduced dimensions, which still stands on Village Lane. And that's about it. Mostly East Marion is just a place on the way to someplace else.

No wonder the people of East Marion want to keep their Mark Rothko.

By the way, the Swamp Fox never set foot in East Marion. He lived his whole life in North Carolina.

We have learned that State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Pitts has granted permission for the move. Rothko's body will be moved to Westchester, and Mell's body, which is currently in Cleveland, will be moved there too. Together, through eternity, they can be side by side.

What we need now is a volunteer, someone prominent in the art world willing to move to East Marion for the remainder of his or her life and then be buried there. The homage of future art lovers would be his or her reward.