| "Grokest, who occasionally had lunch with Rothko, said, 'he'd get food all over the table and his face and his shirt,' eating as if he were simply too famished to observe 'civilized' decorums of the table. Lofty and rabbinical, exacting in his work, Rothko dressed (still) in ill-fitting, secondhand clothes and he could eat with a sloppy abandon, refusing bourgeois niceties, as if his dignity somehow transcended his physical or social appearance. Ignoring Grokest's advice about controlling his drinking and eating, Rothko 'would continue alcohol, various amounts, and he would eat without discretion'...Rothko was too restless, too moody, too absorbed with his own needs, and getting his work done and with getting his work done and with getting his work out, to feel anything but constrained and frustrated by daily domestic life. Removed and controlling, irritable and demanding, Rothko as a parent adopted the very style of authority which he himself most resented being subjected to and which, as paintings like the portrait of his mother and The Rothkowitz Family suggest, he associated with his own parents." --adapted from Mark Rothko: A Biography by James Breslin
Rothko could surely only be a perceiver, feeling constrained by boundaries both social and personal, and his valuing autonomy to such a selfish extent would indicate he was closer to a thinker than a judger, though he was neither. Rothko's strong introversion, intuition, and perceiving preferences possibly overshadowed his feeling preference's part, despite being unreservedly motivated by his valuation of and preference for emotionality over rationality, which I believe may have been better affiliated with both intuition and perceiving than a feeling preference itself seeing how he demonstrated a particular degree of neglect with others' emotionality, self-absorbed and self-interested (but certainly not without reason!). Rothko looks like an INFP to me. |