ROTHKO (Tate & Four Seasons)

Lost in Rothko

Julian Bell applauds a unique gathering of paintings at Tate Modern, and their persuasive, peculiar magic


While Dan Rice slapped brushloads of rabbitskin glue onto the cotton duck canvas, further loads would slop down, warm and pungent, on his head and shoulders. Mark Rothko teetered on a ladder above, heavy as a bear and notoriously cackhanded, rushing his handiwork so that the two of them could cover the entire stretch of fabric before the size cooled. Moving on to another canvas almost nine feet high, the workers might swap places, with Rice getting to rain down on Rothko. The residues that ran off them as they showered afterwards would have been tinted maroon: as a personal variant on standard procedure, Rothko liked to feed pigments into the pan on the hot plate, as his sheets of glue dissolved. That way, the stretched canvas would have a character – a complexion, at least – from the very outset, even before the two of them applied similarly coloured resinous primers to support the upper layers of brushwork. A complexion, a disposition, a bias; this object that Rice had hammered together for him, out of wood and coarse cloth bought at an awnings supplier on the Bowery, would bristle with an inbuilt material resistance.

Rice, a young painter from New York’s Cedar Tavern crowd, was hired by Rothko in the autumn of 1958: his employer, now in his mid-fifties, had risen to renown over the preceding decade as the city’s subtlest and most imperious colourist. Rice’s recollection of hard, messy studio slog provides one firm handle on the now near-legendary project he was brought in to help with, the Seagram murals – the thirty canvases that Rothko produced over eleven months, after he was commissioned to supply paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. For an alternative handle, enter the third room of the new exhibition at Tate Modern, Rothko: The late series.

You walk into a long, pillared hall, lit as dimly as an underground car park for all its high ceiling. Fifteen large canvases surround you. All stretch above eye level, though most are broader than they are tall. Reddish canvases against the dun walls – overall, a low, muted ruddiness – and on each of their expanses, some form of ragged upright rectangle has been brushed in. The light deprivation, the vertical repetitions and the room’s immensity are all temple- or cavern-like cues that direct the viewer towards stillness – if not exactly to solitude. For the experience of Rothko’s Seagram project that this exhibition offers its visitors is likely to be a communal one. If you come to this room, you come quite probably in the expectation that you might feel a certain frisson – and the room has been conscientiously designed to help induce such a sensation; you are among fellow viewers all similarly intent; all factors converge to make it likely that you will be at least partly satisfied. Also, that the spiritual rewards you draw from this public occasion will be broad and blurry, rather than acute: more like those that stay with you after some big outdoor performance than those that come from music heard alone.

The flicker of passers-by and of spotlights reflected on the canvases’ glossier passages forms a resistance that just has to be factored in: it is vain to wish for other conditions; this is the nearest you will ever come to the entirety of the work in question. The show in fact offers more canvases at a single view than Rothko himself could have seen lined up inside the old basketball court on the Bowery where he plotted how to take on the Four Seasons restaurant – before, at last, pulling out of the commission. Only seven of his big paintings could have fitted into the designated dining room, but from the autumn of 1958 to the summer of 1959 he pushed on, developing further runs of so-called sketches and murals that kept overlapping, and a definitive selection never emerged from among their number. Here, one painting which ended up in Washington and five which went to Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum join the nine that Londoners will already know – the items that Rothko himself negotiated to place with the Tate, shortly before his death in 1970. Fifteen excursions from a base of red-maroon: whereas the permanent holdings lean towards blacks and wan mauves, the newly shipped-in canvases brandish quantities of bright orange, and the result is an ensemble with a spiritual complexion all of its own.

For spirit – or one might say soulfulness, the sensation of being a certain mind within a certain body – is the stuff that we are seemingly being thrust towards, via a process of exclusions. This suite of paintings has shed all but a minimum of line, of chiaroscuro and of allusion to objects: instead, its modulations of oranges, crimsons, maroons and blacks floor us with a subliminal thump in the chest. That is what is left of colour on this side of my eyelids, when I close them. This gallery’s interior proposes to be my own interior, as it remains after all my looking and chattering has been done with. That default mode of the soul is formless and fathomless; yet it is restless, also. It stays irritably disposed to seek for images, for a grip on the world without. So, at any rate, I register the compelling invention around which the Seagram paintings revolve, the rough-edged rectangular frame that hovers within the field of the canvas. This device holds everything in suspense – not only the pictorial possibilities of drawing, of fixing contrasts and of image-making, but also the philosophical possibility of opening out onto any not-me whatever.

Grouped around Tate Modern’s Room Three, the massed ranks of these muzzy upright frames, two-barred or three-barred, come together as a solemn, hieratic monument that will mutely absorb almost any description that spectators propose for it, much as an ancient stone circle might. I would characterize the emotional palette as running from snarling oranges to haunted mauves (via many a queasy, equivocal half-tone). You might differ on the particular adjectives: but I expect we would agree that the range of feelings these paintings induce us to enter involve much foreboding and some anger. That being accepted, what remains intriguing is the sheer immediate persuasiveness with which the pictures effect the induction. Rothko’s peculiar magic as a painter was that his bear’s paws could weave gossamer: blunt though his brush often seems, he was exquisite at opening up and variegating the interplay between pigment, binder and canvas. For the benefit of the curious, the Tate exhibition provides technical analyses of his repertory of tricks for holding colours in suspension. (They apparently involved great quantities of eggs.) And those take us back to the recollections of Dan Rice.

Two definite handles, then, on the Seagram paintings: the studio assistant’s physical experience of helping to make them, back in the late 1950s, and the gallery-goer’s psychological experience, half a century later, of entering the present public event. But between the two: so much word-spinning, so much blather. Set in motion, above all, by the artist himself, who was casting around for fresh artistic challenges when the design team from the Seagram organization happened to approach him, offering him an entire room of their new showcase skyscraper to fill with his art. Rothko seemingly tried to kid himself that no one had mentioned the room in question was meant to be the swankiest eating venue in Manhattan. He nonetheless made sure to insert a get-out clause in his contract for this commission – which he duly reached for, when he came to feel that the job had become not so much a challenging opportunity to extend his range as a banal demand to supply wall-fillers. (By 1959 he could easily afford to be so cavalier.) He chose to wrap this creative self-deceit in a smokescreen of rants against fat-cat diners and of self-suggested comparisons with Michelangelo – just as, more generally, he strove to lodge his art within the conceptual framework of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.

Any belief structure that motivated one of the grandees of modernist painting is likely to be historically interesting, but by the same token, its logic may well have turned elusive. It is unlikely that Rothko’s thought patterns in the 1950s, when he dubbed his art “tragic”, will really be transparent to us today as we stare into the red gloom of his abstractions – still less, his complex class feelings, as an upwardly mobile Jewish immigrant to the United States who had left Russia in 1913, at the age of nine. By this point, if we look to the artist’s own rhetoric to guide us through his paintings we risk smothering a first-hand emotional experience with a second-hand sentimental one. Witness Simon Schama, redoubling the bombast as he paraphrases the aspirations of the Seagram suite in The Power of Art (2006):

Their crowding effect, like a frieze, would indeed wrap around the diners . . . . Mastication would slow down and silverware would lie idle as the swallowers were swallowed by the pure power of art . . . . The load they were bearing was the tragic weight of human history. On that earlier trip to Florence in 1950 Rothko had also seen Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, with its blind stone windows. Now he felt his own dark rectangles, that took instead of gave light, would sober up the intoxicated glamorists who lived just for the moment, for that exquisitely pricey meal. After paying the bill, there would be no summoning the limo, no swanning off into Park Avenue.

Yet the way in which the agenda of the Seagram venture was turned on its head does shine a light on the ambiguities of Rothko’s last twelve years of work, as collected in this exhibition. Were those “murals” right for the skyscraper on Park Avenue, or only for the scruffy studio on the Bowery? Was their context meant to be “public” – as the painter began to write, in a manuscript note on the project – or “private”, as he immediately corrected himself, scoring out the alternative? (What then would he have made of the present display?) “Rothko was antinomic to the core of his being”, writes David Anfam, the leading scholar on the artist, in a catalogue essay, well aware that his subject had a habit of taking issue with every single comment ever offered on his art. Witness his own tripwire riposte to would-be sentimental interpreters: “I don’t express myself in painting. I express my not-self”. During the course of the 1960s, that riddling remark, made in 1953, gradually revealed its meanings.

Near the exhibition’s entrance you are given a solitary glimpse of the type of work that had made Rothko’s reputation from 1949 onwards: the big wall-sized canvas, on which fuzzy blocks of colour have been stacked so as slowly to pulse against one another. Was this format, which had so strikingly expanded the scope of American abstraction, starting, after a decade or so, to look rather too compliant? Were viewers becoming simply too ready to immerse their spirits in it, as if in a comfortable bath? This mode of painting might have no place for represented objects, but was it then to become a wallow in immateriality? Must there not remain some tension still to grapple with? What is left of subjectivity, if there is no objectivity to oppose to it? By some such logic, it would seem, those consumer-friendly colour stacks got turned on their side in the “murals” and recast as constraining frames; then in the canvases of the early 1960s, those cushioned block-edges went hard and sharp. And above all, colour – the component of Rothko’s art that had chiefly captivated his public – was served notice to quit. In its place, the picture’s own object-quality, its inherent material resistance, would be defiantly foregrounded.

It was a difficult and honourable turn of direction, and the exhibition which explores it is an admirable project too, by no means a facile crowd-pleaser. Yet as the curators note, Rothko was, in his own singular way, finding a way of running with the tide. He loathed the new contenders who were starting to eclipse his reputation as the 1950s ended, but he eyed them up closely also. An artist who had moved towards minimal icons and maximal rhetorics back in the 1940s, inspired by the example of Clyfford Still, began to turn increasingly dry and laconic not long after Jasper Johns and Frank Stella started exhibiting. The same sullen voiceover that applies to those artists’ early work could be applied to Rothko’s late: “Here’s some paint. What else, in a painting, did you expect?”. When it comes to a particularly rebarbative upright canvas of 1964 – a hard brown square on dense red – the caption might almost read: “I can do Newmans too, after my fashion, just as good as Barney”. (Still, Rothko and Newman, the vatic frontmen of uptown Abstract Expressionism circa 1950, had long since acrimoniously parted: of the three, Newman’s critical ratings remained the highest.) By contrast, a wary regard for the left-field absolutist of New York art Ad Reinhardt generated the most seductive canvases in this exhibition. In five mid-1960s eight-footers, the hallmark black-on-black of Reinhardt’s punchy, punctilious little boards of masonite expands to deliver a mesmerizing, positively luscious challenge to the eyes. Beyond colour is revealed to be a fertile zone.

Inevitably, Rothko’s most extended venture into blackness, the suite of canvases he painted for a specially designed chapel in Houston between 1965 and 1967, lies out of this exhibition’s reach (as does the hapless suite done shortly before for a dining room in Harvard, paintings whose colours proved fugitive). Some terse little pencil notes for Houston are displayed, along with some savourable, heavily saturated gouaches for Seagram. And thus what we chiefly see of the artist’s final years in Rothko: The late series is not his ongoing, ambitious “mural” projects, but rather two groups of paintings about which he scarcely said anything at all – eight brown-and-grey pieces on tall sheets of paper, and seven broad black-and-grey canvases.

They form a tricky coda to his career. Particularly the paintings on paper: the glazing, whether by design or accident, kills any textural life that might be had from their brusque, summary brushwork. The sheet has been horizontally divided and brown has been slammed in above and grey below. The truculence – “It’s paint. What else?” – seems downright strident, because the paint in question is no longer sustained by a rich, mysterious mix of binders: it is straight acrylic, the medium of choice for Hard-Edge and Pop, the anaesthetizing, anti-aesthetic vehicle for a younger generation’s insouciance. For all his declared contempt for his juniors, Rothko was adjusting to the alien new conditions of art, to the point of dismissing his own artistic expertise entirely. There was no longer any “in” or any “out” to the painting, there was hardly so much as a format.

The minimal divisions into above and below continue in the canvases of black and grey. These too are in acrylic, but here and there, they have at least a gestural vivacity. In one canvas, done shortly before Rothko’s suicide in February 1970, the finger-scribbles in the field of grey actually approach the calligraphic. It’s not a lot, but in this context of radical renunciation it seems like drama.

Above those frisky scribbles stands the black, dense and inert. “It is simply too easy to see black as a funerary colour”, claims Briony Fer in a subtle and challenging catalogue essay. True, if we are talking about those eight-foot black-on-black canvases done six years before, objects of singular beauty that refuse to yield up ready meanings to the interpreter. But here, I only wish her arguments could convince me. These final paintings of Rothko’s look to me all too like metaphors for the great and obvious fact that retrospectively hangs over them – muffled, grunted metaphors, to be sure; but that, I would conjecture, is because Rothko was aware that such a transparent symbolism (“This is my endgame”) represented a lapse into bad faith on the part of an abstractionist whose work had always thrived on ambiguity. For all that, they are by no means paintings that induce gloom, as might fairly be said of the far more imposing Seagram works. They are distant; odd; on the edge of null. They refuse to be possessed by the viewer, and perhaps that is just what Rothko was after, at the end of his journey into the cold north of modernist materiality. Surely, though, it was a journey downhill?



ROTHKO
The late series
Tate Modern, until February 1
Achim Borchadt-Hume, editor
ROTHKO
256pp. Tate Publishing. £35 (paperback, £24.99).
978 1 85437 788 3


Julian Bell is a painter and the author of Mirror of the World: A new history of art, which was published last year.