Views of the new Tate Rothko Room, London.
I have not seen these in person, but they do seem to convey more violence and anger than in his other work. They are almost like jails.
Posted on 05/08/2006 6:05:20 AM PDT by 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.
Views of the new Tate Rothko Room, London.
I have not seen these in person, but they do seem to convey more violence and anger than in his other work. They are almost like jails.
Art ping #2 today.
Let Sam Cree, Woofie, or me know if you want on or off this art ping list.
Don't worry. I'm sure it's me.
They DO?
If you really do want to know more about the form and content of Rothko's work, check out my home page for clickable "classes" on many periods in art history. The Abstract Expressionist lecture deals with Rothko.
I didn't like his work right away. I wanted to see the NYC Guggenheim once for its architecture and was initially disappointed to see that it was a Rothko retrospective that was on view. But after I circled through his colors and life, I had a much greater appreciation for his work. There is a breadth of colors, moods, and power in his work that is best experienced in person.
From the Seagram images on line, I had never liked that series as much as his other blocks. But now I am beginning to reconsider after reading this article.
Art that requires a learned dissertation to appreciate has failed as art.
I was thinking more like Stonehenge or just rectangles on rectangles.
You have to be kidding calling this stuff 'art'.
Ummm, I don't see anything, violent or otherwise.
Agreed. Art expresses - it does not need to be interpreted. It absolutely doesn't need a priesthood.
It is exactly this sort of pretentious bullsh!t that extinguished the majority of my appreciation for later 20th c "art". And the equally pretentious author has the audacity to say this gobbledygook justification is "entirely clear". It is intentionally opaque. Yet, when you actually throw out the null language and b.s., it comes down to Rothko saying his paintings have no soul, and contain nothing but commonplace human existence.
Thanks for reinforcing negative stereotypes about conservatives concerning art. If you had any knowledge of Rothko's history, you wouldn't make such asinine comments.
Where's the breathless and gushing "you can see how he's suffered for his art" comment? LOL
You don't need to interpret this, intellectually. What's your gut reaction to staring at a huge red painting with bars or squares -not as you see it on a screen but in reality, when it fills your field of vision ?
If your gut says nothing, then nothing needs to be understood. If you see red as the color of fire, blood or wounds, then you might react to the painting the same way.
I paid thousands of Daddy's good dollars for art school, dipstick. For once, I have the qualifications to run my mouth off.
I repeat: if you have to know the artist's history to understand the art, he has failed. He might be a really interesting case history, but he's no artist.
A lot of this abstract art seems to be more about what the viewer is bringing to the painting than what the painter put into it.
I'm not a painter, but I am a writer, and to say that his self-indulgent, opaque writing style "makes his meaning entirely clear" is just B.S. The impression it leaves is of an utter narcissist who was just seeing what he could get away with by being haughty and deliberately obscure.
I'm sure that many of us would carry these negative stereotypes as a badge of honour. Rothko's appreciation of his own work is mystagogic twaddle and should be recognised as such.
But you touch on an interesting point: there is a fault line between Democrats and Conservatives, not least in the way the two groups engage with this sort of "art". It is similar to the way in which the two groups accept - or reject - communist dialectic and post-modernism.
The Democrats are more vulnerable to this sort of guff because they have a lack-of-belief system, a kind of extreme skepticism which can find no floor to the universe. As Chesterton famously said -
When people no longer believe in God, they do not start to believe in Nothing. They start believing in Everything
One's understanding of art is largely determined by what is in one's soul. Today's art is meager, misshapen and malnourished because it is a product of that type of soul.
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