ARTS

Exhibitions

Mark Rothko (Tate Gallery, till 1 September) The Artist's Eye: paintings selected by Lucian Freud (National Gallery, till 16 August)

Rothko redux

Giles Auty

My sentiments about Rothko are rather like those I experienced once about a new in-law. When the family urged me to like him, I found that I couldn't, but by the time the others had grown disapproving I had just begun to find him agreeable. Sales resistance should never be confused with mere perversity.

For art students today, the cultural imperatives of 25-30 years ago must be hard to understand. For my conservative tastes, the massed ranks of modernists of that time had too much fervour and too little sense. As in early films of the Nuremberg rallies, one witnessed the glazed eye, signal of unclouded conviction, as the apostles of modernism rushed for- ward on the trail of progress. Woe betide the waverer, or those displaying the least reservations about the correctness of the cause. To be unorthodox was to be apos- tate, yet few seemed aware of the absurd paradox of a crushing orthodoxy imposed in the name of total artistic freedom. In terms of an art career, the right to disagree amounted only to the right to self- banishment. In its day, worshipping Roth- ko was one of the great acid tests of orthodoxy. He, more than any, had be- come the Golden Calf of modernist inter- national formalism, before which genuflec- tion was in order. Today, to decry Rothko will not necessarily cost the ambitious young lecturer, critic or museum curator his career prospects. Indeed, one of Roth- ko's greatest former protagonists told me, only the other day, that he sees him now as 'a second-rate painter'. Tempus edax re- rum: time, the devourer of all things.

The Tate's present exhibition of the works of Mark Rothko comes at an excel- lent juncture and provides us with welcome chances for reassessment. For some, here too, is a first chance to see Rothko's figurative and surrealist paintings which antedate what we have come to regard as his typical marks: fuzzy-edged rectangles reposing on soft beds of colour. As he grew older, Rothko's hues grew generally more sombre and darkly imposing. Gaiety and sensuality took a holiday from which they never came back, as a brooding sense of tragedy took over . . . 'Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear/To be we know not what, we know not where.'

Rothko's later work is sad, serious and tragically obsessed; a series of reverberat- ing bass notes wrung from the depths. As early as 1949, Rothko greatly enlarged the size of his canvases while reducing the range of shapes he would use thereafter to a minimum. By eliminating line and relying entirely on soft, amorphous forms to do his artistic bidding, Rothko placed great, poss- ibly unbearable strain on colour. Colour became his sole vehicle for different forms of content, but these too were becoming increasingly depersonalised. Rothko aspired to paint the universal and sublime, yet was concerned, oddly enough, with the dangers of misinterpretation. Would he, or could he, communicate his transcendental Mark Rothko, 'Untitled', c. 1951-1952 sensations accurately to the viewer? I feel Rothko could have found an answer in the

late self-portraits of Rembrandt, wherein

the artist's expression of wry resignation suggests the answer is bound, usually, to be

'no'. Artistic greatness challenges, rather than endorses, the gamut of human feeble- ness. We can approach great art more

closely only through growth in ourselves. In one of a number of illuminating essays which enrich the exhibition's excellent catalogue, Irving Sandler asks: 'Were

Rothko's paintings of transcendental ex- perience too private, too humanly vulner-

able, too reduced, even impoverished in their pictorial means to he major?'. The perceptive critic Robert Hughes believes this is the case. I wonder how the present- day viewer will react, now that much of the former fury of critical debate has abated. In his lifetime, Rothko was almost as critical of his supporters as of his detrac- tors. He felt more or less everyone except his dealers presumably — ha largely missed the point. Although Rothko achieved financial as well as critical recognition in his later years, he grew increasingly isolated even from those colleagues who had arrived at similar degrees of success. The fickle focus of art-world attention was shifting, t°°' from the ponderous seriousness of the abstract formalists beloved of Clement Greenberg, towards the jokier and more immediately accessible imagery of such as Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol and Hock- ney. Rothko battled on, hoping to see the dark intensity of his iconography stimulate and re-awaken depths of spirituality M his fellow man. Sadly the time — the Sixties-- was against him, just as it was hostile to other purveyors of genuine profundity. Rothko became increasingly depressed and irritable until, overcome by feelings of futility, he ended his life. What we see now is a monument not only to artistic ascetic- ism but to the artist's considerable skills with materials, which are easy to overlook. Perhaps his final weakness lay in the frailty of his sustaining philosophy, a fault exacer- bated by the length of his retreat from the reassurance of the tangible world. His most regrettable legacy was an army of eighth- rate imitators who battened on to his imagery but forgot his message. Among a number of bright ideas, the National Gallery is to be congratulated on that of asking a leading artist, each year, to make a selection of his or her favourite works from the gallery's collection. Unfor- tunately the idea works properly only if the artist chosen is willing to explain his reasons for the choices. Without such explanations, the exercise becomes re-

latively fruitless, amounting largely to tak- ing a number of paintings from one part of the building and hanging them in another. I admire Lucian Freud greatly as an artist. I cannot emphasise this more strongly than stating that the two works of his own included at the organisers' request — stand uP well to paintings by masters such as ktibens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Turner, Ingres, Degas and Cezanne.

Freud reiterates the axiomatic notion that visual art is meant for the eyes. On the other hand, the common viewer might have hoped to gain valuable insights from the written perceptions of a major artist. By saying little or nothing, Freud continues the stance, abetted by Lawrence Gowing his erYptic book on him, of the professional enigma.