Most artists, speaking primarily through their work, adhere to a simple maxim: “Don’t talk painter – paint.” Leonardo, Durer, Klee, and Kandinsky, all of whom wrote extensively about the practice of art, are among the few artists whose theories are as profound as their paintings.Yet occasionally an artist comes along who ultimately may be a better theorist than he is a practitioner.

Mark Rothko (1903-70), whose paintings are among the most important works produced by an American at mid-century, has posthumously proved to be a gifted writer on art – possibly greater than he was as a painter. Rothko published a number of essays, critical reviews, and letters to the editor in his lifetime. But it wasn’t until 2004, when the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, published his father’s long-lost manuscript “The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art” that Rothko’s brilliance and eloquence as a thinker and writer were firmly established.

“The Artist’s Reality” (Yale University Press, 176 pages, $16.50), which has just been released in paperback, is a collection of 12 beautifully written and clearheaded essays from 1940-41. Addressing art in terms of tradition, myth, history, philosophy, form, politics, biology, and emotion, Rothko asserts the individuality and necessity of the artist, as he also reaffirms that the Abstract Expressionists were continuing an ancient tradition. This is one of the most important documents written by an Abstract Expressionist – or by an American painter.

A new book, “Writings on Art” (Yale University Press, 192 pages, $25), edited by Miguel Lopez-Remiro, brings Rothko’s genius into full and more personal light. Comprising some 90 documents – essays, lectures, statements, letters, and interviews from 1934-69 – this compilation uncovers a deeply passionate mind seriously grappling with the meaning of art and life.

I have always been drawn to, but never completely convinced by, Rothko’s paintings. They leave me initially breathless but ultimately in need of something more.

The mature works for which Rothko is best known – the large abstractions of shimmering colored lozenges from the 1950s and ’60s – have often been referred to as “icons” and “mysterious.”Their hazy, gem-like atmospheres and hovering, soft-focus rectangles seductively rub against, push in front of, and fuse with each other, producing vertical fields that float before you like colored fog. These are canvases into which you must throw yourself as if surrendering to a freefall, and they achieve a paradoxical conflation of monumentality and intimacy. Both beautiful and brash, they are surprising for their machismo softness and for their smallness writ large. It is as if the artist had taken a single passage in a Bonnard or a late Titian and blown up that intensity to mural scale.

Looking at a Rothko, depending on its color and mood, can be a heady experience akin to walking into a hothouse in full bloom, or it can be disquieting and melancholy, like crossing paths with a funeral procession. Always in Rothko there is intensity of feeling, yet because most of the action happens around the edges of his forms, where colors collide, there is also vagueness of structure and lack of specificity. Though I find myself seduced by the gorgeous, vibrating edges, I often feel that the larger color forms are staring out at me like wide-open mouths with not much to say. I have the complete opposite experience while reading the artist’s writings – in which there may be some contradictory fuzziness around the edges but the center is always sound.

Rothko has a dual reputation as one of the most gentle and one of the most heated of personalities. “Writings on Art,” which alternates among breezy letters, personal testimonies, and emphatic, often contradictory statements, conveys that hot and cold personality.

Here we meet the pedagogical Rothko who developed a whole philosophy while teaching art to children, arguing, “Painting is just as natural a language as singing or speaking.” Here, too, is the warm, affectionate Rothko who wrote tender, personable letters to such friends as Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Herbert Ferber, and the curator Katherine Kuh. And we encounter the professional, methodical Rothko who stipulates exactly how his paintings should be lit and the exact number of inches they should be hung above the floor.

We also come across the angry, emphatic Rothko who “hate[s] and distrust[s] all art historians, experts, and critics…a bunch of parasites, feeding on the body of art” and who detested “the whole machine for the popularization of art – universities, advertising, museums, and the Fifty-seventh Street salesman.” This is an artist so dedicated to his paintings and to the life they lead once they leave the studio that, in 1952, he refused to participate in the Whitney annual because “the real and specific meaning of the pictures [is] lost and distorted in these exhibitions.” (He refused to let his works enter the Whitney’s permanent collection for similar reasons.)

“Writings on Art” also gives us a portrait of the artist and of his time. By separating Rothko out as a unique voice within a chorus that included Pollock and de Kooning, it expands our understanding of the Ab Ex go-italone spirit. (At different points Rothko adamantly states that he is, and is not, an abstractionist; that he is, and is not, interested in color.) His writing makes clear that, despite similarities with others, being an artist is always about the individual in the studio – never about the group.

During an address to art students at the Pratt Institute in 1958, Rothko remarked, “Self-expression is boring.” He was obsessed with attaining a universal, heroic, yet deeply intimate art that “expressed basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” He was also a real stickler for exactitude. In a letter to Kuh, dated July 28, 1954, he states that he has chosen to write his own foreword for a catalog, rather than to grant an interview with her, because:

The question and answer method at once present[s] insuperable difficulties: for the question imposes its own rhetoric and syntax upon the answer regardless of whether this rhetoric can serve the truth, whereas I have had to set for myself the problem of finding the most exact rhetoric for these specific pictures.

If, for example, I were to undertake the discussion of “space” I would first have to disabuse the word from its current meanings in books on art, astrology, atomicism, and multidimensionality; and then I would have to redefine and distort it beyond all recognition in order to attain a common meeting ground for discussion.This is a dangerous and futile battle.The strategy may be brilliant but the soldier is dead.

Rothko also repeatedly states his antagonism toward people who do not take art seriously. Reading his letters, it is difficult not to sympathize with him. For instance, while he was teaching in Boulder, Colo., in 1955, his paintings were exhibited on campus. He wrote to Ferber that, “One of [my paintings], on my first visit I found was hung horizontally. I phoned the hanger about this error, ‘Oh, it was no error’ he said, ‘I thought it filled the space better.’ I swear by the bones of Titian that this is true.”

Yet Rothko was also extremely trusting of the authority and spiritual weight of art and of his work in particular. In another letter to Kuh, dated July 14, 1954, he writes about the power of his pictures:

And if I must place my trust somewhere, I would invest it in the psyche of sensitive observers who are free of the conventions of understanding. I would have no apprehensions about the use they would make of these pictures for the needs of their own spirits. For if there is both need and spirit there is bound to be a real transaction.

That “real transaction” – what Rothko saw as an inexplicable yet universal form of spiritual communication between artwork and viewer – obsessed him in both his painting and his writing. He invested his entire being in the belief that such a transaction was possible through the experience of his art, and, as is evident in these two books, he worked hard to explicate exactly what that transaction was, why it was important, and how it might be attained. Although Rothko’s paintings may not speak for themselves as clearly and succinctly as they could, we can now pursue that “real transaction” with his other impassioned voice – the word.

lesplund@nysun.com