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.

[prion]

Artists don't always write well about their work. That doesn't necessarily detract from the art, however.

You're missing the point. Artists who write splendidly about their art don't make it any better, either.

A visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, with its imposing silence, natural light, and wall covering murals that seem to open into galactic depths, will persuade you that your own commentary is both uninformed and ill-considered.

I've sent plenty of Rothko's work at the National Gallery and , if I recall correctly, the Hirshhorn. Just because you don't agree with an opinion doesn't make it either uninformed or ill-considered.

[Hiddigeigei]

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air"

http://www.artrenewal.org/

[Kay Syrah]

That line is where the words supporting the art are more important than the art itself. The paintings by themselves (in my opinion) have little to offer other than the fact that they are big and red.

Well said. Critics perform a valuable function, in describing successful art, but can't make bad art successful. I'm often surprised tho, by what I expected to dislike and find quite powerful. (but not because I read the exhibit notes, LOL) Anyway, perhaps I shall take in the Tate next week and see for myself.

[Kay Syrah]

Could you please add me to your ping list? Thanks

[atlaw]

Just because you don't agree with an opinion doesn't make it either uninformed or ill-considered.

Well, you aren't simply expressing a personal dislike, you are staking out a psuedo-authoritative position that Rothko's work is "failed art," whatever the heck that means. Your "opinion" is therefore subject to rebuttal as both uninformed and ill-considered.

[Republicanprofessor]

I agree about Twombly and Rauschenberg. I know what we are "supposed" to see and say about their work, but it still does not go to a deeper level. Over time, the important artists will be seen for their deeper content. Then people will tire of those works and seek others and resurrect their reputations from the dustbin of history. But the shallow artists will sink. Rauschenberg, and Johns, were clever. Perhaps Johns cleverer than Rauschenberg. But pasting things together from everyday life, with no deeper retrospection, doesn't work for me in the long run.

Rauchenberg's Monogram; Johns The Critic Sees (look carefully at that one: glasses and two mouths, not eyes) and Twombly.

I hesitate to post the Twombly, because I know how Freepers will explode on that one. If you search for images of Twombly, you will see variety in his "scribbles." But I sometimes think the luckiest artists are those who latch onto a major style with a subtle variation, so they can get attention without having to make major creative breakthroughs and all the work (and frustration) associated with that. But I also think that in the long run their art is less likely to be respected.

[Republicanprofessor]

A visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, with its imposing silence, natural light, and wall covering murals that seem to open into galactic depths

Thank you for your insight.

I visited there a while ago but only had 10 minutes, 5 of which was spent buying slides. I am dying to go back and really sit and think about those works in location. They do seem much bleaker than his other works, with less to offer. But I like your "galactic depths" comment very much.

[SlowBoat407]

I visited the Rothko chapel on a trip to Houston and felt like I needed a hot scrubbing shower afterwards. There was something distinctly dark and disturbed in his work, and I wanted no part of it.

[Republicanprofessor]

perhaps I shall take in the Tate next week and see for myself.

If you do visit the Tate, please do let us know what you think. I have not been there in a few decades.

[Leg Olam]

Spareness to the point of vapidity is a hallmark of much of the so-called modern. The redeeming quality is that they do express formalism in a derivitive post Mondrian sort of way and are surprisingly well coloured. The meditative effectiveness of much of this sort of work is highly over-rated. IMOP.

[Republicanprofessor]

You have both been added to the ping list.

Thank you.

[prion]

Well, you aren't simply expressing a personal dislike, you are staking out a psuedo-authoritative position that Rothko's work is "failed art," whatever the heck that means.

I thought I made that abundantly clear: art that cannot be fully appreciated by simply looking at it, but has to be propped up by written explication.

Your "opinion" is therefore subject to rebuttal as both uninformed and ill-considered.

Saying "you're wrong" is not a rebuttal.

[Jabba the Nutt]

It's just Early Barcode.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Rothko is typical of the scam artists who are predominate in 20th century art. People afraid to accept their initial reactions as valid and capable of being talked into "sophistication" accept these amatuerish dubs as "art". By such standards as these I am an "artist" myself and a great one.

I rule of thumb is if I can reproduce it it ain't art.

[Republicanprofessor]

I visited the Rothko chapel on a trip to Houston and felt like I needed a hot scrubbing shower afterwards. There was something distinctly dark and disturbed in his work, and I wanted no part of it.

That may be true, but the very fact that the work affected you so much shows that the artist was successful in conveying content through his works, whether you liked it or not. Perhaps works are even more powerful when we react viscerally against them.

I didn't have enough time when I was there to really get to that state. I got there as soon as I could, but I still only had 5 minutes before they closed.

[atlaw]

I've noticed that the Chapel can have that effect on certain viewers. Like I noted, it has a peculiar way of working on the imagination. Personally, I find that it reveals increasing imagery and a kind of perpetually expanding field of view with each visit, almost as if you are looking through a window into the depths of a subtly shifting universe.

[Republicanprofessor]

Spareness to the point of vapidity is a hallmark of much of the so-called modern.

This is particularly true of Minimal art, and I wonder more and more whether minimal art is heading more towards postmodern than modern. But that's a question I need to ponder more. The best modern art has a spiritual center that is replaced by the superficial in Minimal and Postmodern Art.

Still, to me, there is a great deal more emotional content in Rothko, on the left, than in the similar work by Ellsworth Kelly, minimal color field artist, on the right. Minimal art is very much like what Frank Stella said: "What you see is what you get."

Kelly's work creates some very subtle curves and form with ostensibly simple lines. But there isn't a great deal of depth beneath the surface.

[petro45acp]

Actually, I like my window of perception....just so long as I am the one doing the limiting.

Good catch though!!!!!

Bravo!

Top sends

[Republicanprofessor]

Personally, I find that it reveals increasing imagery and a kind of perpetually expanding field of view with each visit, almost as if you are looking through a window into the depths of a subtly shifting universe.

Well said.

I think the important thing is to keep one's mind open. Many modern works take more looking and thinking than the simple realism of the past. And even then we can change our minds as we learn more (isn't that like life too?). I have always felt that the Houston chapel did not have as much power as Rothko's earlier work.

I am being proven wrong. Thank you for your enlightening comments.

[petro45acp]

Frankly I've seen pics of that Houston chapel, and Wright's Racine office complex does more for me. Nope, if one needs to expand one's imagination, read some good speculative fiction, or hey, didn't Hawking just release a new improved and more accessable history of time? Goedel-Escher-Bach is another good read. Staring at the scrapings of a self involved artist isn't gonna do it.

If art doesn't portray something discernable ...

More stuff.

Cheers,