A room full of violence, and the silence of death: Tate unveils new Rothko Room

Telegraph.co.uk ^ | 05/06/2006 | John Banville

[Republicanprofessor]

As Tate Modern unveils its new Rothko Room, Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville reveals the story behind the paintings it contains, and reflects on one of the most compelling experiences to be had in any gallery in the world.

In 1959, while travelling in southern Italy with his family and that of magazine editor, John Hurt Fischer, Mark Rothko discovered a surprising classical precursor to his contemporary art…

A room full of violence, and the silence of death (Filed: 06/05/2006)

As Tate Modern unveils its new Rothko Room, Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville reveals the story behind the paintings it contains, and reflects on one of the most compelling experiences to be had in any gallery in the world

In 1959, while travelling in southern Italy with his family and that of magazine editor, John Hurt Fischer, Mark Rothko discovered a surprising classical precursor to his contemporary art…

Red on Maroon (1959) by Mark Rothko, who said: 'I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room'

On the journey down from Naples the party had fallen in with a couple of Italian youths who offered to act as guides. At Paestum, where the odd-assorted little band picnicked at noon in the Temple of Hera, the young men expressed their curiosity as to the identity and occupations of the Americans. Fischer's daughter, who was acting as interpreter, turned to Rothko and said: "I have told them that you are an artist, and they ask whether you came here to paint the temples," to which c replied: "Tell them that I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it."

The set of colossal canvases housed in Tate Modern's Rothko Room originated, as every art-aware schoolboy knows, in a commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on New York's Park Avenue. The commission, one of the more remarkable instances of incongruity in the history of art patronage, was for 600 square feet of mural-sized paintings to decorate the walls of the restaurant - "a place," according to Rothko, "where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off " - although it is not clear if Rothko realised from the outset that his paintings were intended as a backdrop for fine dining. The architect Philip Johnson, who assisted Mies van der Rohe in the design of the building and who was chief commissioner of the Rothko murals, always insisted that the painter knew that they were to be hung in the restaurant.

Great art can be fitted into the oddest places - on a chapel ceiling, for instance, or in a millionaire's bathroom - but it does seem remarkably brave on Johnson's part to call on Rothko, one of the most uncompromising of the Abstract Expressionists (a label Rothko vigorously rejected), to soothe the savage breasts of New York's richest bastards and their mates.

Rothko himself was straightforward, at least in private, about his motives in taking on the Seagram commission. He told John Fischer: "I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won't. People can stand anything these days."

Back in New York, Rothko and his wife went to dinner at the Four Seasons, and in the spring of the following year he returned Seagram's $35,000 fee and withdrew from the commission. One supposes that his experience that night of the restaurant and its rich and powerful diners turned his artistic stomach. Eventually, he decided instead to donate the paintings to Tate.

This transaction was also to prove fraught, for Rothko, despite, or, as is more likely, because of the great critical and commercial success that had come to him in the 1950s, tended to detect slights and veiled insults at every turn. After a visit to London in 1966 to discuss "the gift of some of my pictures to the Tate", he wrote in icy fury to Norman Reid, the Tate director: "Your complete personal neglect of my presence in London, and your failure to provide adequate opportunities for these discussions, poses for me the following question: Was this simply a typical demonstration of traditional English hospitality, or was it your way of indicating to me that you were no longer interested in these negotiations?" Reid himself said that he had been waiting for Rothko to approach him, worrying that otherwise he might put off the notoriously prickly artist by seeming too eager.

Compression: rehanging Tate Modern's new Rothko Room

In the end, as we know, artistic feathers were smoothed and the Rothko Room opened at Tate in 1970. Rothko knew exactly in what way he wanted the pictures hung and lit. In a list of "suggestions" to the Whitechapel Gallery for a 1961 show of his work, he had stipulated how the walls should be coloured - "off-white with umber and warmed by a little red" - and said the pictures should be hung "as close to the floor as possible, ideally no more than six inches above it" in a room with ordinary daylight, since it was in daylight that they were painted. As we can see in the Rothko Room, the Tate Gallery and now Tate Modern followed these instructions to the last detail.

The room is one of the strangest, most compelling and entirely alarming experiences to be had in any gallery anywhere. What strikes one on first entering is the nature of the silence, suspended in this shadowed vault like the silence of death itself - not a death after illness or old age, but at the end of some terrible act of sacrifice and atonement. In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors.

Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space's greyish lighting - itself a kind of masterwork - the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable - as Rilke has it: "Beauty's nothing/ but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear."

Here we are in the presence not of religion, but of something at once primordial and all too contemporary. On a notecard from the 1950s, Rothko had written, in his usual clotted style that yet makes his meaning entirely clear:

"When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer & terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity."

In a way, the murals would have suited the Four Seasons, one of those modern-day temples and Houses of Mysteries where the sons of man - and sons of bitches - feed daily upon the blood sacrifice of their own ferocious, worldly triumphs.

[LexBaird]

Challenge: find two Rothkos that are EXACTLY alike, and I'll concede you your point that he did just repeat himself.

Four thousand slightly different variations of horizontal and vertical rectangles does not make for variety of theme. It's a one trick pony. But that is beside my point, which was that the greatest amount of content in a "conversation" with a Rothko work is that which the viewer brought with him. It's just blocks of color, arranged in various proportions.

People have written on this tread about it opening windows into interstellar depths or invoking primal blood and rage. But those perceptions are not what Rothko brought to the party; they are what the viewer brought. Without foreknowledge of Rothko's life and angst, the paintings could well be close-ups of Highland tartans or Navajo rugs.

I think this sort of abstract acts more as a mirror to the viewer, a sort of mandalla, than it does as a communication between the artist and the viewer. Since I believe the communication is the vital essence of good art, this fails for me. I acknowledge Rothko's technical mastery, but as art, it will not long endure.

[Republicanprofessor]

What he and other abstractionists are "trying to say" may be closer to what people get from architecture or music than from literature or traditional canvas painting.

Actually, you are nailing it, in terms of critical theory. In the 1950s, Clement Greenberg (and others) noted that modern art has progressively become flatter and flatter and truer to the basic components of painting: which is: a canvas, stretcher, paints, and a brush. They even wrote that visual art should refer to no other art in its making. Therefore, all literary references are irrelevant.

That's probably what many object to: the fact that there isn't a story or narrative in these works. But these artists wanted to communicate more viscerally--and thus universally--instead. You didn't have to know the myth of Achilles to see blood and feel the violence of war. (And, judging from some comments on this thread, they succeeded.)

This "formalist" theory is actually derived from Kant, but I am not a philosopher so I won't bore you with that. It was carried way too far in the 60s with color field painting that is solely about the canvas, paint soaked into the canvas, the depth of the stretcher making it an object, etc.

It is at this point that I agree with those who keep making reference to the Painted Word. The theory becomes more important than the artwork, and the latter are pretty empty and souless.

Works by Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. The latter's technique was apparently quite intriguing because he got those ripples of color with poured paint in rivelets, not easily done when you consider how little overlap there is between the colors.

[Republicanprofessor]

Rothko's work really can't be photographically reproduced. It is almost entirely dependent on color gradations that seep through like pentimento under varying lighting conditions, and the pigments, layering, and multiple levels of color fail entirely in photographic reproduction.

Not to mention the size. Having one of these human-sized images a foot or two from you face is an entirely different experience than 100 x 200 pixels on the computer in your lap (where the color changes if you just move the angle of the screen).

I'm getting a hankering to visit a museum with Rothkos really soon. Wish Houston was a little closer to New England. :)

[LexBaird]

Well, that's it then. You're right and I'm wrong. Feel free to burn all the Rothkos because you hate them. Yawn.

It's good that you know when to retreat. I particulary like the hyperbole followed by feigned disinterest.

[Republicanprofessor]

But a good photo of what you describe, especially with the green and purple, might have beeng great art!

[LexBaird]

You might try some Kinkades. I hear they go well with "sunset gold" wall paint and knotty pine dining room suites.

Nahh. People like you have inflated the price too much.

[DugMac]

Great Art? The King has no clothes.

[justshutupandtakeit]

While I have not spent a great deal of time looking at Rothko's work (why should I when there are plenty of pieces by incredible artists to pay attention to?) I have seen originals at the Art Institute. Compared to that of hundreds of other artists his work just takes up wall space which could be put to much better use. Without a frame around it or being on a piece of canvas it would be easy to believe such works could be preparatory work on a wall prior to painting or plastering.

Modern art is not devoid of plenty of interesting, if not great, art and I like a lot of it. But Rothko's is at the bottom of the barrel and relates to real art as does Schoenberg to Beethoven. They are not in the same catagory. His would be the easiest to imitate of the name artists of the twentieth century. Particularly that which is one color on a canvas.

I think half the "art" racket is just being brazen enough to put it forward and claim it is art since few people are willing to stand up and call it what it is for fear of being called a "philistine". One of my favorite examples of such was the rags which looked as though they had been used by a housepainter tied around the columns of a federal building in Chicago. Another is the pile of junk being passed off as sculpture in a building across the street from that building.

Art without a spiritual diminsion is vacuous and the Left has destroyed diminsion in almost every area of culture. Culture as a creative and positive force appears to be dead in our day thanks to socialism and atheism. Now it is primarily a celebration of the ugly and the twisted.

[LexBaird]

Really? Says who?

Says me. Can you postulate a circumstance where art exists in a void? Consider all the things we catagorize as art, and tell me which is not based on the communication of some message. Dance, music, theatre, poetry, visual media, literature: all are communications with other humans or the Divine.

What if his understanding of happiness is different from yours? Should he portray his understanding, or yours?

He should portray his understanding in a way that it is conveyed to others. How are others to understand his happiness unless he relates it somehow to a more universal condition? If I were to paint a series of yellow triangles with great subtlety, crisp and vibrant hues, and hang them in a museum, would you understand the "I'm happy!" message?

Maybe, if you associated the images with happiness, but not because I communicated what they were supposed to mean within the art. Even if I wrote a dissertation on the transcendent symbology of the dialectic between the Golden Rule and the Holy Trinity and the ability of same to distill the essence of joy through pyramid power, it would not change the painting's content, though it might influence your mindset on viewing it.

Art without audience is the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Who cares if it produces sound waves? It may be technically prodigious, but without the participation of another it is ultimately pointless.

[atlaw]

I take it that, in your view, Rothko's work is "hostile to good artistic manner, to devotion to form and respect for the masters."

[Sabatier]

I'm late to this thread but wanted to thank you for posting those pictures. I like narrative art but also find something intriguing about Rothko's use of painted fields of color juxtaposed against each other. The works by Morris Louis and Noland show how colors played off each other suggest emotion in more obvious ways than Rothko. All these artists are in the tradition of the cathedral stained glass artists, in my opinion, just abstract, rather than narrative.

[LexBaird]

No, I just find him shallow and contentless. As abstract expressionists go, he's more technically proficient than most. As they say in the comics, "If only he had used his powers for good, instead of evil." Or, in his case, pointlessness.

Art can be hostile, violent and ugly, if that is the point the artist is trying to get across. Guernica, for example. The trouble with abstraction is that it has been pushed to the edge of being void of intrinsic meaning. Beyond some point, it becomes pigment, binder and canvas arranged in an arbitrary manner. It may have technical merits, but so what, if it is empty? Any similar arrangement will do as well. Beyond what the viewer himself brings to the experience, what does one random Rothko bring to the interaction that another does not?

[atlaw]

Yeah, yeah. All them modern artists is frauds. Gotcha.

[Republicanprofessor]

One of my favorite examples of such was the rags which looked as though they had been used by a housepainter tied around the columns of a federal building in Chicago. Another is the pile of junk being passed off as sculpture in a building across the street from that building.

Can you be more specific about who these artists were? Or give us pictures? I may agree with you; I may not. I need to see a visual image first.

[justshutupandtakeit]

You must not have read my comment. While no modern artist can compare to a Caravaggio, Titian, Rembrandt, Da Vinci or Michelangelo some have produced work worthy of looking at. I cannot say the same about this particular one.

But like in music and literature the best is in the past.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Nope it was years ago. But my description is accurate. The columns are square maybe 4X4 and the rags were maybe four inches wide and looked exactly like the rags painters clean up with and were spaced about four feet apart going up the column. Support may be more accurate a term than column.

That first I thought they were going to re-paint the black supports. Then I thought it was a joke.

[Republicanprofessor]

It sounded a bit like Christo, but he would have wrapped it entirely.

Daniel Buren does a similar thing with stripes. I knew you'd love it.

I actually saw this in Paris. So many of these contemporary artists have a one-liner like this that they stretch forever for the right reputation. So, he's making a play on columns. And.....it's fun, it makes the space more fun to walk through, but I don't see it going deeper than that.

But maybe others do....

[Tokra]

This work DOES speak to me - it reminds me that I need to clean my window screens now that spring is here.

[Sabatier]

"The trouble with abstraction is that it has been pushed to the edge of being void of intrinsic meaning."

What is often overlooked is that the early modern artists were usually highly skilled painters and draftsman, first solidly trained in traditional European painting techniques. Later artists often lacked those unfashionable skills and so they hid behind novelty or shock tactics. Their work is often very shallow for that reason, a mile wide and an inch deep.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Cristo produces masterpieces compared to the crap I am referring too and the columns you show actually required an ability to paint a straight line unlike the rag work.

Those would have merely raised a wry eyebrow not made me mad at such pretensions.