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Meditation on meaning

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Rothko
Tate Modern, until 1 February 2009

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.