THE ARTS: Mark Rothko wanted his work to make good the spiritual emptiness of 20th-century life. Tate Modern's sombre but powerful show proves that his paintings can still inspire awe, writes Aidan Dunne
LARGE EXHIBITIONS ARE scheduled years in advance, so one can only presume that the Tate galleries in London had a unique insight into current economic developments when they scheduled two exceptionally dark shows as this year's autumn highlights. There's Francis Baconat Tate Britain and now Rothko: The Late Seriesat Tate Modern, an exceptionally sombre experience that doesn't allow much room for optimism in its musings on being and nothingness. The pervasive gloom is counterbalanced only by a feeling of wonder that Rothko is prepared to pursue the argument to its deepest and darkest conclusions, that he is not interested in the consolations and distraction of illusion.
Rothko was 66 when he took his own life early in 1970. In the kitchen of his New York studio, one February evening, he took an overdose of barbiturates and cut an artery in his arm. His body was found the next morning by his assistant. He hadn't left a note. Beset by health problems, on several forms of medication and estranged from his family (his wife, Mary, and their children, Kate and Christopher), he had been miserable, depressed and anxious about an impending visit by an agent from his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, who was to select work for sale from the studio, something he was extremely uncomfortable about. Rightly, as it happens. Rothko was betrayed by his financial adviser, Bernard Reis, who, unknown to the artist, was employed by Marlborough.
It has been suggested that the artist knew he had made a bad deal with Marlborough: following his death, his children's trustee, Herbert Ferber, embarked on their behalf on an unprecedented and protracted legal battle against the gallery and his executors, including Reis. The judge found in favour of the children in 1975.
Born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in what is now Latvia but was then part of the Russian empire, Rothko moved with his family to the US in 1913. Their circumstances soon became difficult when his father died suddenly, but Rothko completed high school and won a scholarship to Yale. He was very unhappy there, however, and dropped out, working in the garment industry for a while and considering taking up acting before attending art classes. His instructors included Arshile Gorky, a formative influence on several of the emergent Abstract Expressionists, and Max Weber, an erstwhile Parisian modernist who had turned to Jewish social and religious themes in his art.
If Rothko hadn't made a breakthrough in his painting around the mid-1940s, he would have remained a minor, marginal figure in the history of 20th-century painting. Until then, he'd struggled to find a mode that suited him, amassing a substantial body of work that ranged from moderately interesting and conventional to fairly awful.
From the mid-1940s, largely due to the influence of friend and fellow artist Clifford Still, the edges in the paintings began to soften, the once-representational forms to dissolve and coalesce. Many strikingly good paintings emerged, characterised by areas of luminous, dematerialised colour. By 1949, he managed to dramatically simplify things even further, devising the audaciously spare format of soft-focus colour oblongs with which he remains firmly identified.
Rather than being interested in formal values, in colour, composition and texture, for example, Rothko bullishly asserted that what concerned him was what these elements embodied, conveyed and expressed. And that was nothing less than a way of making good the spiritual emptiness of modern life. Having read Nietzsche, he'd struggled vainly to devise a representational or figurative language that could reinvent or renew the mythic archetypes and religious rituals and certainties that had been displaced. But while he rejected the term because of its aesthetic connotations, abstraction offered a much more fruitful way to do just that. People could reconnect with the spiritual in the amorphous, meditative spaces opened up by expanses of colour unanchored to any particular image. To engage with a painting by Rothko was to enter a timeless, tragic realm.
OR WAS IT? It's clear that Rothko agonised over this question continually, and never more so than when he took on the commission that forms the centrepiece of Rothko: The Late Series. In 1958, he was invited to paint a group of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in Mies Van der Rohe's iconic Seagram Building. Perhaps the glaring disparity between the nature of his work and the location - an extremely upmarket restaurant - did not initially occur to him, but eventually it sank in, and he stalled on the project, producing more and more potential candidates for the seven available spaces, some 30 paintings in all, restlessly substituting one for another and rearranging the sequence.
He remarked, facetiously, that he hoped to put people off their lunch. In the end, he realised that the gulf between his artistic aims and the essentially decorative function of the work in the Four Seasons was unbridgeable. He withdrew from the commission and returned his fee.
In time, the paintings found their way to the Tate, the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Many of them are reunited in the current exhibition in one vast, murkily lit gallery, something that should cause alarm bells to ring.
Here we are, looking at a number of disparate works made as unresolved components of an unfulfilled commission, arranged in a space that implies a certain coherence and consistency. Hardly surprising, then, that the consistency does not emerge. Sure, there is a broad similarity between all of the work, with its muted browns and maroons, its outline patterns. Taken individually, there are powerful pieces, but together, even in such a huge space, they feel unduly crowded together and less than satisfactory. By its nature, Rothko's work invites contemplation, but here it is somewhat thwarted by the setting.
Other rooms in the exhibition are more successful. Rothko didn't shy away from equating the act of looking at his paintings with a religious experience, and there is a formidable literature that accepts his assertions at face value. The fact that viewers were reduced to tears in front of his paintings proved his point, he claimed. But in appealing to such transcendental ideas, he was playing for high stakes indeed. One problem is that any such judgment is entirely subjective, dependent, like religious belief itself, on a leap of faith. If you are unmoved by a particular painting, does that mean that you lack spirituality, or that the painting is flawed?
A better line of approach to his work might dispense with the categorical need for a spiritual component while allowing that it is not exclusively formal, that it does address profound areas of thought and feeling. Faced with one of the black-on-black paintings that feature prominently in The Late Series, you would be hard put not to be drawn into reflecting on such things as time and mortality. They manage to evoke "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces" that filled Pascal with dread.
Rothko had an ability to imbue an apparently blank expanse of monochrome paint with visual energy. In fact, those monochrome expanses were generally built up of successive coats of thin paint, applied with a light touch and evidencing tiny tonal variations.
After a brush with death in 1968, and in continuing poor health, he made two series of landscape-like works featuring a single horizontal division between grey and brown and grey and black. Painted on paper and canvas respectively, they feature blank white borders, an odd and slightly problematic innovation. They are generally viewed as reflecting his state of depression and exhaustion, expressive of a closing down of interest and possibility. Certainly they are stark to the point of bleakness. But they are also audacious in their starkness, and some of them are outstanding. As an exhibition, The Late Seriesis itself stark and audacious, eschewing the brighter colours that account for much of Rothko's popularity. It is also a flawed show, but one well worth seeing.
Rothko: The Late Seriesis at Tate Modern, London, until Feb 1, 2009; www.tate.org.uk
