In a stroke of daring, high-fever gloom, Tate has dedicated this autumn’s leading exhibitions to the two most pessimistic painters of the 20th century. Francis Bacon, born in Ireland in 1909, and Mark Rothko, born in Latvia, then part of the Russian empire, in 1903, have much in common.
Both were outsiders – one a homosexual, the other a Jew – who grew up on western Europe’s fringes; both came to occupy essential but controversial positions on the international stage, one in European figurative art, the other in American abstraction.
Both are painters of existential anguish, creating in windowless, hemmed-in spaces a Huis Clos world of calculated claustrophobia. Bolshie atheists, both understood instinctively that postwar painting risked bankruptcy if it did not aspire to spiritual authority – thus the triptych, echoes of the Crucifixion and apocalyptic visions that recur in their work. And, as Tate dramatises effectively at Millbank’s Bacon show and at the new exploration of Rothko’s late paintings at Tate Modern, both stood apart from their times in reaching for tragic greatness, gambling absurdity, repetition, embarrassment and poverty for the chance of Old Master gravitas.
At Bankside, Tate has stacked the odds by focusing exclusively on the difficult late period, from 1958 to 1970, which ended one February evening when Rothko slit his veins, overdosed on antidepressants, and was found next morning in a pool of blood in his New York studio. Does the legend of his suicide – so graphic and so visually evocative of the deep brooding reds shading to purple and black that dominated his palette in these years – shape the way we respond to the intransigent, barely penetrable canvases here as hallowed and sublime?
Or was suicide the only way out for a painter who had played painting to its endgame, finishing up, in the black and pale grey acrylic paintings of 1969 in Tate’s final room, with a sparse, crepuscular intensity which reduced art to fundamental, biblical chords of darkness versus light?
You have to work hard at this show. Tate’s permanent Rothko Room, of course, is among its most popular; the coup here is that for the first time since they left Rothko’s studio, the Seagram murals which the artist donated to Tate are reunited with others in the series from Washington and Japan’s Kawamura Museum, and put in context with subsequent work. X-ray studies reveal the complex veils of pigment and subtle colour relationships in the late pieces; one, the glowing 1958 “Black on Maroon”, is installed so that viewers can walk around the back of the canvas as if to divine its secrets. Supported by sketches and models, and an excellent catalogue, this is a serious, scholarly endeavour which sets out to demystify Rothko and reclaim him as the pure painterly painter he passionately was. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that we would all be having a better – and more comprehensible – time, had this first Rothko exhibition in 20 years been a broader chronological retrospective.
Rothko trained with American colour field painter Milton Avery, but did not hit his stride until 1949 – significantly at a time of emotional devastation following his mother’s death – when he developed the large-scale, cinema-screen format of floating oblong blurs in contrasting yet complementary soft-edged, furrowing colours. A perfect example is the voluptuous “White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)”, which sold for $72.8m in 2007, becoming – until a Bacon recently beat it – the most expensive postwar painting to be bought at auction.
With astonishing elasticity, and lyrical reworkings of a bright-red-yellow-orange tonality, Rothko made variations on this template for most of the 1950s. Then suddenly the warmth changed to midnight blues, heavy greens, greys, black.
“I can only say that the dark pictures began in 1957 and have persisted almost compulsively to this day,” was the artist’s comment. Rothko was adept at self-sabotage. Maybe the floating-form pictures had become too easy, or too popular – Rothko had a horror of success, believing that “as an artist you have to be a thief and steal a place for yourself on a rich man’s wall”.
The 1958 commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building offered a new dimension. Rothko liked his paintings to envelop the viewer; now he could make a modern immersive installation. Rarely seen preparatory studies here, lovely gouaches executed at domestic scale, indicate the careful deliberation as he set to work with malicious intent: “I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”
An important inspiration had long been Fra Angelico’s bright tempera frescoes in a serene Florence monastery; now – the addition of the visiting works at Tate enhances the sense of architectonic structure – Rothko made his own fugue-like arrangements of dark reds on mauves on blacks, the colours radiating against each other in dense overlapping layers, at once closed in and luminous, repressed and ecstatic. Are the strong verticals classical columns, sealed tombs, bricked-up walls, portals to the unconscious? Are there, as is sometimes claimed, allusions to Jewish graves dug after the pogroms of Rothko’s childhood, or to the infinite American landscape of his adopted country?
The former is too precise, the latter way off. What the long rhythmic Seagram installation here, suggestive of cathedral architecture, confirms – and why Rothko returned the cash and withdrew the murals from the profane commission – is the religious impulse at the core of an art that looks back not just to an orthodox Jewish upbringing but to the exalted calling of pre-revolutionary Russian painting.
The 1964 series of black paintings here, exquisite surfaces of shiny and matt paint, at once austere and sensual, emanating a solemn light, recall Malevich’s “Black Square”, hung like an icon, and beyond that the phosphorescent 19th-century nightscapes of Arkhip Kuindzhi, as well as the contemporary minimalism of Americans such as Ad Reinhardt.
Unlike Pollock or Mondrian – whose hermeticism he recalls – Rothko did not define himself as an abstract painter. “I belong to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure,” he said. “It was with the utmost reluctance that I found it did not meet my needs. Whoever used it mutilated it. No one could paint the figure as it was and feel that he could produce something that could express the world.” In his lush 1950s paintings, Rothko fulfilled Van Gogh’s prophecy about the expressive possibility of colour. But he is so emotionally charged a painter that when colour drained finally away, in the last black and grey works here, framed in harsh white to declare themselves as minimal objects, the loss is felt just as extravagantly as the earlier rapture.
Rothko, Tate Modern, London SE1, to February 1; tel: +44 (0)20 7887 8000. Then Kawamura Memorial Museum, Sakura, Japan, February 21-June 14 2009
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