It's Mark Rothko's birthday on September 25, and I'm thinking of the single art course I took in college. I had a very good professor who was unapologetic about his own taste. In one of our classes devoted to fifties and sixties American art, he got to the Rothko slides. He gave a perfunctory explanation of these fairly simple works -- rectangles of color with soft edges, usually two or three per canvas. They were said by some to evince a sort of revelatory power or spirituality, maybe if you stared at them long enough. He clicked through them quickly, ready to get to the next artist.

After the professor disposed of Rothko in under a minute, a classmate raised her hand. "I just wanted to say that even though we pretty much skipped over him, I do think that Rothko's paintings are really powerful, and that they have a really big effect on me." To his credit, the professor appreciated her response. But he didn't click back to the Rothko paintings.

In James E.B. Breslin's 1993 biography of Rothko (1903 - 1970), we see that these paintings were not only said to contain revelatory power, but that they were meant to. Rothko took this stuff seriously, saying things like, "My work has the power to convey a new vision." He believed he'd discovered a "new structural language." He was a self-designed prophet of modern art, inventing a new spirituality through painting. This new religion didn't have a cosmology, deity, and especially didn't have symbols, which Rothko rejected wholeheartedly. But it did have transcendence.

In Breslin's book, we follow Rothko's search for the approach that would become such a significant contribution to art and painting in the twentieth century. He was in his forties before he started making his "multiforms," and even after he started painting them in his studio, he didn't show them right away. Breslin dissects and details the techniques Rothko developed upon creating his greatest works. He rotated the canvas as he worked, so that the painting wouldn't be weighted in any one direction. He spent much more time in the studio figuring out a painting than actually painting it, and he filled a canvas as many as twenty times before feeling it was done. Maybe most important, he worked tirelessly to eliminate any recognizable shapes from the multiforms. They needed to come into the world fully formed, not as interpretations of any real-life objects, but meaningful visions in and of themselves.

Rothko was testy. Always unsure whether he wanted to be accepted or preferred to be misunderstood, he was deeply insecure about his abilities as an artist while simultaneously excited about having an audience. He "felt, at best, ambivalent about any exhibition of his work." But such contradictions don't deter devotees of mysticism -- maybe they're even inherent in the transcendent power of Rothko's vision. He was a Russian Jew who would eventually help design a Roman Catholic chapel in Texas to house a series of his paintings. He was a painter who believed his work could change the way we think about spirituality, but he was so nervous about attention that he'd throw up before art openings. He was a deeply complicated man whose most important work was deceptively simple. A few shapes on a canvas might seem like no big deal, but only if you click through the slides too quickly.