Meditation on meaning
Andrew Lambirth
Rothko
Tate Modern, until 1 February 2009 The first thing that should be noted is that this exhibition is not the retrospective that its title implies. In fact, it’s a severely limited show, concentrating on the late work only. There are therefore none of the joyful, brightly coloured paintings that sell so well around the world in reproduction. This exhibition is an altogether more sombre experience, the work darker and more minimal. I wonder how many people will buy their tickets (£12.50 per head, concessions £10.50) expecting a feast of colour and be disappointed. I hope they won’t — this is a fascinating exhibition — but it is not a general introduction to the work of Mark Rothko (1903–70).
In the front of the accompanying catalogue (£24.99 in softback), a quote from Rothko is emblazoned: ‘If people want sacred experiences they will find them here. If they want profane experiences they’ll find them too. I take no sides.’ It’s a large boast, to maintain that your work encompasses the gamut of experience from sacred to profane, but the generation of Abstract Expressionists to which Rothko belonged did lay claim to the sublime in no uncertain terms. They offered their lives for their art — their health, their sanity — and, in return, expected to be connected to the wellsprings of existence. In his own lifetime, from the mid-1950s on, virtually no American critic doubted Rothko’s genius. Reams of often impenetrable verbiage were produced in praise of his work, very little of which serves to elucidate the central problem — does one believe in Rothko?
This is patently not the same question as ‘does one believe in God?’, but American critics seem on occasion to have confused the issue. Rothko wanted to be a great religious artist, but for that (at least in traditional terms) he was living in the wrong age. Yet he assumed the mantle of assurance that a Renaissance painter of nativities or crucifixions might have worn. He accessed, he claimed, the ‘tragic and timeless’. But how much of that spiritual resonance is authentic? Robert Hughes has famously called Rothko ‘one of the last artists in America to believe, with his entire being, that painting could carry the load of major meanings and possess the same comprehensive seriousness as the art of fresco in the 16th century or the novel in 19th-century Russia’. So do we take his work on trust, do we believe that it is great religious art because the artist says so? No, like doubting Thomases, we have to experience it for ourselves.
Rothko generously donated nine paintings to the Tate Gallery which arrived in London the same day that his suicide was announced, on 25 February 1970. They were set up, as specified by the artist, in a room of their own at Millbank, which took on something of the aura of a temple or shrine. The Rothko room became a place of pilgrimage, somewhere to sit quietly with one’s thoughts, to contemplate in an increasingly secular age. People who wouldn’t dream of going to a church were able to find some sort of peace in the Rothko ambience. How much of this emotional or spiritual authority was conferred by knowledge of Rothko’s own history remains open to speculation. Do we read into his paintings more meaning because of what we know of the artist’s personal tragedy? The aim of the Tate’s current show, according to Rothko’s daughter, is to show the power of his work as pure painting, divorced — as far as this is possible — from biographical knowledge. Small task.
The exhibition is built round the Rothko gift to the Tate, and opens with a group of five oblong crayon, pastel, gouache and graphite studies, small horizontal colour drawings for murals to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. This was the beginning of the series known as the Seagram paintings, named after the modernist building in which the restaurant was housed. Rothko withdrew from the Four Seasons project but went on to produce a body of 30 related mural paintings, nine of which he gave to the Tate. If the first room is low key, the drama really begins in room 2, where a single painting is hung, ‘Four Darks in Red’ (1958), an immediate predecessor of the Seagram commission. The room is small and the painting takes over the space as Rothko intended. (He wanted viewers to feel they were in the larger paintings.) This is the way to see Rothko: one to one.
‘Four Darks in Red’ consists of four bands of varying thickness arranged horizontally on a landscape-format canvas. The bands seem to hover, as if in a lather of spatial and emotional ambiguity. A centrally placed gap of red between the darks could be read as a horizon line, or as a prairie fire running low on the earth with a dark sky above it. But such a reading, though perhaps reassuring to those who dislike the totally abstract, does not get us very far with Rothko. The painting is really about brushmark and colour contrast, about space, and more especially about the viewer’s own response to the work. Is the picture about emptiness or eternity? Perhaps it can only ever be a reflection of the viewer’s inner state.
Room 3 is the heart of the exhibition, a large space in which eight of the Tate’s Rothkos are united with other Seagram paintings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura. The effect of 14 large Rothko canvases is overpowering, dark and rich, the sombre yet sensuous colour carefully nuanced, the empty squares and vertical bars of their structures conjuring a remarkable interplay of presence and absence. Here orange, black and maroon offer many different surfaces to the eye: matt and reflective or with the bloom you find on an unwashed grape. Moving around the paintings, the surfaces change with the fall of light, from reflection to shimmer and fade, catching and giving back light. Different positions of internal shapes, different proportions, different intensities of colour: on such subtle variations do these works depend. There is the persistent feeling of being very much on the threshold of something, perhaps something numinous.
In other rooms there are near-black paintings, a series of brown and grey acrylics on paper, another of black and grey. Though vertical in format, these paintings suggest landscape and weather, though they are really only about dividing up the rectangle and varying grey to blue, and brown to biscuity mud lightened with white. Refreshingly, there are no wall panels of intrusive information to distract the eye. We are left to study the paintings and each to discover our individual response to Rothko, whether anguished or uplifted, sacred or profane.
Most, I suspect, will feel obliged to manufacture a ‘spiritual’ reaction; not to, would be to admit a serious lack of sensitivity, and risk the label of coarseness or philistinism no modern exhibition-goer would readily countenance. My advice is to be toughminded. If you see nothing there, say so. Far better that than to pretend. ❑
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