On "Caravaggio's Rothko" In my short story "Caravaggio's Rothko," a restorer working on Caravaggio's 1599 Judith & Holofernes makes a discovery that turns the art world on its head. While removing years of dirt from around Judith's neck she discovers, in the creases and shadows of Judith's skin, an exact replica, although many times smaller, of an early painting by the first generation Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. The discovery is detailed and a figure is offered illustrating a 74% overlap of brushstrokes in the two paintings. Once the discovery is made public, other paintings-within-paintings are uncovered, including Franz Kline's Chief in the headband of Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine and William De Kooning's Excavation in a joint of St. Michael's armour in Bruegel's chaotic The Fall of the Rebel Angels. The impetus for these copies is traced back to a late night at the Cedar bar, in which Robert Motherwell supposedly came up with the joke of blowing up small sections of master paintings and calling it a new movement in art. Immediately following, Motherwell et al searched out their inspiration, the trails of which are now being discovered. The whole short story is presented as the introductory essay of a catalog to an exhibition of originals, their copies and detailed notes connecting the two at The Whitney. The story's conclusion then offers a substantial revision to the definition of Abstract Expressionism as a spontaneous application of paint in creating a nonrepresentational composition. A joke has been conceived, carried out and uncovered. But what are the repercussions? I believe that despite the perhaps debatable originality of thought behind the story, the consequences haven't been taken far enough. The story suffers from neglecting what I found are three logical extensions the plot has raised. Likeness and distortion in painting have a number of roots in caricature where the sacredness of the picture gives way to flapping ears and bulbous noses: to laughs. From Odysseus or Heracles dressed up as fools on Greek vase paintings to ribald woodcuts ordered by Luther depicting the Pope, caricature has served the dual purposes of humor and politics. Ernst Gombrich, in "The Principles of Caricature," to which I owe much of the ideas contained in this short essay, describes copiers of manuscripts illuminating margins with fantastic creatures. In combining the sacred and the profane in these texts he wonders, 'Was it a belief in some magic power to ward off the evil spirit, or just an innocent desire to indulge their sense of fun? Are the weird gargoyles awesome spells or merely facetious inventions?' These same questions I tried to turn on the painters of my story, perhaps hinting at a similar conclusion to Gombrich's, that 'perhaps one alternative does not exclude the other.' My story argues that the seemingly nonrepresentational nature of Abstract Expressionism is in fact rooted in the more austere tradition of the masters; it is just formalism on a different scale, antiquity up close. My Motherwell and company rested assured their art was an extension of the past, no matter how spontaneous it appeared. They were satisfied with keeping the knowledge of their secret formalism to themselves, and it is only the effects of the exhibition which my story pretends to preface that will open up a new era of Abstract Expressionist criticism in the years to come. The coiner of the term 'caricature,' Annibale Carracci, an establishment-friendly painter of the same time as Caravaggio, reportedly said, 'Is not the caricaturist's task exactly the same as the classical artist's? Both see the lasting truth beneath the surface of mere outward appearance. Both try to help nature accomplish its plan.' This is where my story ends, with the shock of a Pollock traced back to a sketch of a table by Manet; humor balanced with a new era of criticism, one alternative not excluding the other. But, as the first of the three shortcomings noted earlier, I believe I have missed out on a fundamental aspect of caricature. Regarding the actual subject of a drawing, Gombrich says, 'It may happen that when we meet the victim in real life we are forced to laugh at him, because his picture is linked inseparably in our minds with the caricature we have seen. We have been taught by the artist to see him anew, to see him as a ridiculous creature. This is at bottom the true and hidden aim behind the portrait caricaturist's art.' This was Luther's aim in representing the Pope, and the cause of muffled snickers in a too-suddenly-quiet lunchroom when the boss comes in. What repercussions could this have on my story? If the subject of a caricature can no longer walk the streets without reminding us of the potential size of his rear, then the subject of Rothko's painting, Caravaggio, might suffer a similar fate. In fact, the future status of the copied masters in my piece lies not only uncertain but un-dealt with. The exhibition of parent and child, side-by-side, goes up at the Whitney and not a word is breathed about how the other Raphaels and Titians of the world are faring. For could a master then be seen without peering a little closer, wondering if a 1950's Barnett Newman isn't hidden in the regal folds of a clergyman's brow by Daumier? The masters would forever walk hand-in-hand with Rothko and Motherwell, the violent colors of New York seeping into the newly restored shadows of the 17th century. And whom were the Abstract Expressionists copying? The Caravaggio picture at the center of the story aims an arrow at the piece's second flaw; as Rothko's use of Caravaggio as his subject would change how we would forever see the master, Caravaggio, in his paintings, had changed how we saw the religious figures he portrayed by using well-known whores and homosexuals of his time as his models, thereby making inseparable the 'sacred' and the 'profane.' The woman on whom he chose to base the Judith of his Judith & Holofernes, the painting at the center of my story, was the prostitute Fillide, whom he had used on numerous occasions. Peter Robb, in his Caravaggio biography M, says of the painting, 'He showed a beheading rather as it might be slowly and clumsily done by a determined but inexpert young woman, and felt by the adult male who'd been ready, a moment earlier, to enjoy her body on the bed where he now lay shocked and dying.' The real is chipping away at the sacred. The fact that this commonality between Rothko's distortion of Caravaggio and Caravaggio's distortion of religious figures goes by unobserved in the story is what I believe one of its great faults. The story fails to look to the past, not seeing the subject permanently disfigured by the caricature: in every Judith lies a Fillide, in every Caravaggio a Rothko. I also believe, in what I think is the story's third drawback, that the secret Rothko had to hide, that his paintings were derived from someone else's art, could be projected onto future events; namely, the bitter hatred Rothko felt towards Andy Warhol and Pop art could now have a new explanation. In the story, the Abstract Expressionists have concealed their inspiration as an inside joke which has only recently been unfurled by an Italian restorer. That means the Abstract Expressionists were perhaps secret sisters to the Pop artists. Seeing these young Pop artists brazenly reproducing and manipulating images from TV and supermarkets, taking over the modern with the postmodern, a movement the Abstract Expressionists, sworn enemies of Pop art, actually invented with their 'copying', must have driven my story-Rothko mad. The Abstract Expressionists destroyed by a movement they themselves had created. In James Breslin's Mark Rothko the real Rothko, at a party given by Yvonne Thomas, seeing Warhol and friends arrive accused Thomas of treachery exclaiming, 'How could you let them in?' With postmodernism, Breslin says, 'one can no longer lament the fate of a person being reduced to an image--because one can no longer speak of persons.' Gombrich echoes this when he says of caricature, 'To copy a person, to mimic his behaviour, means to annihilate his individuality. The very word "in-dividual" means inseparable.' Caravaggio had tainted the images of the Bible with his models from the street. Rothko had distorted Caravaggio by magnifying a shadow of Judith's neck a hundred-fold. Warhol crushed the Abstract Expressionists by projecting their secret on the big screen. If these conjectures had gone back into my story it could have been a richer, more expressive world. I wonder if another quote of Gombrich's here could not apply: 'Look, here is his whole secret. You need not be afraid nor even impressed; it is all a hollow sham.' "Caravaggio's Rothko" was first published in 42opus. Main Stories Pictures A picture An essay on a story A story by my brother Dave from a book he published with his friend Alex Contact Links