Exhibitions

Mark Rothko (National Gallery, Washington, till 16 Aug)

Deeply seductive

Roger Kimball

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By th' mass and 'tis — like a camel indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale.

Polonius: Very like a whale.

The only surprising thing was how long it took: I was well into the third or fourth gallery at the big retrospective of Mark Rothko's paintings and works on paper before the expected words floated up. 'It's so ... spiritual,' said one woman in hushed tones. 'It's very Zen,' agreed her compan- ion, looking about reverently at the dark, abstract paintings. Mark Rothko has always inspired a lot of spirit-talk: indeed, he assiduously cultivated it, and his death by suicide in 1970 added fuel to the fire. Rothko's signature paint- ings — which he started making around 1950 — are closely modulated washes of colour, one band hovering delicately on top of another. The best of them are sumptu- ous symphonies of colour. But they are symphonies of a Philip Glass variety: the execution is fastidious but the means are minimal. The effect, when it works, is hyp- notic.

As this retrospective makes abundantly clear, Rothko's one real talent as a painter was as a colourist. His early representation- al work from the 1930s is partly embarrass- ing, partly just pedestrian. His 'symbolic' abstractions from the 1940s — when the influence of Mira, Milton Avery and de Chirico is written like a label on his work — is clumsy and forgettable. What Rothko could do, and do very well, was to balance one colour against another to striking effect. He wrung a wide spectrum of emo- tion from his misty blues and greens and greys, his tense yellows and brooding reds.

That never seemed to be enough, though. Rothko famously denied that he was a colourist. But then he also denied that he was an abstract painter. This is one reason that people have always felt licensed to import their own little stories into Rothko's paintings. Rothko's best paintings are immensely, and immediately, likable. They are so popular because they are so easy. Their appeal — simple compositions that they are — is almost purely aesthetic: people respond to the pleasing colour har- monies. Writing in 1955, the critic Clement Greenberg observed that Rothko was an artist whose work 'asserts decorative ele- ments and ideas in a pictorial context'. The question such art raised, Greenberg noted, was 'where the pictorial stops and decora- tion begins'.

Of course, 'decoration' and 'decorative' are fearsome words for modern artists, especially modern abstract artists. They are diminishing words. They lack the gravitas one wishes to claim for one's art. From its very beginnings, in the early years of this century, abstract art has had a bad con- science about the 'merely' aesthetic. It has soothed that bad conscience with a rich and sometimes comic verbal filigree imput- ing all manner of religious, philosophical, and even political significance to its art. Mondrian's neo-Platonism, Kandinsky's theosophy, Malevich's geometrical mysti- cism: this is art that came armed with an alibi.

It is the same with Rothko. I won't say that more nonsense has been written about his art than about the art of the other Abstract Expressionists: the competition for that distinction is too ferocious for one to be confident about declaring a winner. But Rothko has certainly inspired a power- ful lot of nonsense. Back in 1961 when the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhi- bition of his work, the art historian Peter Selz provided a typically embarrassing essay for the catalogue. Rothko's paintings, he told his readers, 'can be likened to annunciations', 'the metaphor of the cre- ation of some universe becomes paramount . .. These "shivering bars of light" assume a function similar to that loaded area between God's and Adam's fingers on the Sistine ceiling.' And so on.

It would be interesting to know what Aesthetic appeal: 'Untitled, 1953 Rothko thought about this when he first read it. We do know that he became incensed when the essay was brilliantly sent up by the sculptor and art critic Sidney Geist in his short-lived art paper Scrap. Rothko demanded that Selz's essay be replaced when the exhibition travelled. But the truth is that Rothko's painting has con- tinued to attract such silly religio-sentimen- tal musing. Thus Professor Anna Chave, writing in Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstrac- tion, tells us that 'those images of Rothko's that parallel the pictorial structure of a pieta, such as "White Band (Number 27)", ... might be said at the same time to paral- lel the structure of a conventional mother and child image'.

Well, anything 'might be said'. The paint- ing to which Anna Chave refers is included in the National Gallery's exhibition. It is a blue rectangle, 81 by 86 inches; in the cen- tre of the rectangle there floats a narrow grey-white band; above it sits a wider blue- grey band, below a band of charcoal-grey. You might say that it parallels 'the pictorial structure of a pieta', but then you might say that it is almost like a camel, backed like a weasel, or very like a whale.

The catalogue accompanying this new retrospective is full of the same sort of thing. Item: 'Whatever such speculations about the pre-tragic, Rothko, having aban- doned the romantic aporias of the tragic, moved also to the only available post-tragic territory, the absurd.' Indeed. The National Gallery went to a lot of trouble with this exhibition. They produced an exquisite, if largely unreadable, cata- logue, and took great care in the installa- tion of the pictures. I very much doubt, however, that this exhibition will do any- thing to enhance Rothko's reputation. There are, to be sure, some marvellous pic- tures from the 1950s (the exhibition opens with one of the best, 'No. 61'). But there are not as many success stories as one would like. And the long run-up to those pictures everyone associates with the name `Rothko' is a big disappointment, as are the several extremely poor paintings with which the exhibition concludes.

Most of the really bad paintings are from the Rothko family collections, and their presence here makes one wonder whether a certain amount of attic-cleaning isn't going on. I should be very surprised if many of these pictures did not turn up on the art market soon after this exhibition concludes its tour and its effort to bolster Rothko's stock among collectors. Enemies of abstract art generally assume that any given group of abstract pictures are pretty much the same and that it is bootless to pretend that one is better than another. One valuable lesson of this exhibi- tion is to show how mistaken that view 1!: all you have to do is look. Rothko at his I best was a deeply seductive painter. It is n the nature of seductions, however, that when they fail they leave their prey not indifferent but repelled.