Neuroscience vs art: Let’s talk across the divide

I AM in London’s Royal Academy of Arts looking at its Abstract Expressionism exhibition. Of the US artists in the show, I am most drawn to Jackson Pollock, famed as “Jack the Dripper” for his anarchic technique, and Mark Rothko, magician of floating veils of colour. Rothko’s No. 4 seems to tint the air in front of it, much as a stained-glass window does. That it is given an “opus” number, like a piece of music, signals it is not a landscape, sunset or whatever. It is what we call an “abstract” painting, a mode that seemingly reduces visual art to its basic elements – exemplifying the kind of art beloved of brain scientists.

I am accompanied by a French friend. She is an artist and is particularly attuned to the physical attributes of the work as something made from paint. I tell her about my first overwhelming encounter years ago with a set of Rothkos in the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. She talks of the complexity of the orange and black rectangles. As we move closer, we intuit the ambiguous veils of colour, the translucent and broken layers of unevenly applied paint with their fuzzy fringes. No. 4 is radiant, but I think of other Rothko paintings that have sadly dimmed over time.

There are other spectators at what is a well-attended exhibition, and we are all too aware that we are looking at “high art” promoted by a post-war US to demonstrate its creative freedoms in the face of Soviet socialist realism.

Some years ago, I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a place suffused with melancholic spirituality. I know Rothko was a Jew from Russia. Was making modern iconic paintings linked to his early experience of Russian icons? By the time of his suicide, at 66, did he consider that he had ultimately failed in his aim to create a kind of absolute art?

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