While in Tate Modern I spent quite a long time in the Mark Rothko room, allowing my eyes to adjust to the low lighting, and after a while subtle shades, tones and nuances gradually appeared in his black and red on maroon series, a gift of 9 murals to the gallery.
The monumental paintings seem to hover, contemplative, darkly glowing. Surfaces ambiguous, porous, edges soft and ragged , forming borders between big colour zones – a pocket of stillness and silence in the noisy, bustling world. Repetition and variation characterise R’s series – he stated “if a thing’s worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again – exploring it, probing it…” (Tate, booklet accompanying the exhibition “Rothko The Late Series”)
When Rothko accepted the commission in 1958 for the restaurant of the Seagram building, he was excited by the idea that he could make a room out of painting – that painting could go beyond the individual canvas, that would create an environment that the viewer would be in.
The first thing he did was to rent a studio, a half size basketball court with hardly any daylight. Here he made a series of 30 murals, up to 3m dimension, working on them simultaneously so that the work on each could inform the others, using a system of pulleys to move and shuffle them around, up and down as needed.
He eventually withdrew from the commission and paid the money back. There are many stories as to the reason, among them his doubts about the appropriateness of the setting. But he had also outstripped the ambition of the original project, producing far more murals (30) than were required (7), and he didn’t want to limit his paintings to the terms of the commission.
In 1961 a critic seeing them hung in R’s studio said they created an atmosphere almost like a chapel, and that they were as ambitious as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. According to Schama, they were deeply influenced by Michelangelo’s library in the Medici basilica of San Lorenzo.
R apparently rotated the paintings while working on them. Close up, in strong light, drip marks from previous orientations, spatters, layering and reworking so can be detected (Tate). R ignored the rules (eg regarding layers of oil, tempera and acrylic) to get effects he wanted; also this was a time of great technical innovation, for example there were new colours around and R made use of pigments which reacted to one another. Acrylic paints were still a huge novelty. As a consequence, there have appeared substantial conservation issues with some of the paintings.
While the Seagram murals were predominantly dark red, warm maroon and black, Rothko’s earlier work had been lighter and colourful, but consistent with his style of stacking fields of subtly nuanced colour on a monochrome background, with ragged borders and soft edges.
Subsequently his pallete became darker still, the murals in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas raven blacks and purple – later still he began to lay down a field of luminous light grey next to black, shining like the moon.
Finally, and these are said to be some of his most brilliant work, he produced a series of acrylics on paper. Rothko would have approximately twenty sheets of paper cut from a large roll which would then be taped onto easels surrounding the room… “Rothko painted very rapidly, and on a good day he could produce fifteen works on paper…. he painted with great energy, moving his whole body, not just his wrist. Some of these works seem to have materialised effortlessly, the grays applied with a single sweep of the brush. Such works contrast with more labored paintings on paper which Rothko could not resist revising and editing”. (Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, New York 1984, pp.52-4).
References
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/rothko-and-tate-long-term-relationship 31/01/2015
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rothko-untitled-t04149/text-catalogue-entry
BBC.co.uk
Simon Schama’s Power of Art, pub BBC Books, 2006
Jane Crathern's OCA Practice of Painting Log 