Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Meditation on meaning

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Rothko
Tate Modern, until 1 February 2009

‘Four Darks in Red’ consists of four bands of varying thickness arranged horizontally on a landscape-format canvas. The bands seem to hover, as if in a lather of spatial and emotional ambiguity. A centrally placed gap of red between the darks could be read as a horizon line, or as a prairie fire running low on the earth with a dark sky above it. But such a reading, though perhaps reassuring to those who dislike the totally abstract, does not get us very far with Rothko. The painting is really about brushmark and colour contrast, about space, and more especially about the viewer’s own response to the work. Is the picture about emptiness or eternity? Perhaps it can only ever be a reflection of the viewer’s inner state.

Room 3 is the heart of the exhibition, a large space in which eight of the Tate’s Rothkos are united with other Seagram paintings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura. The effect of 14 large Rothko canvases is overpowering, dark and rich, the sombre yet sensuous colour carefully nuanced, the empty squares and vertical bars of their structures conjuring a remarkable interplay of presence and absence. Here orange, black and maroon offer many different surfaces to the eye: matt and reflective or with the bloom you find on an unwashed grape. Moving around the paintings, the surfaces change with the fall of light, from reflection to shimmer and fade, catching and giving back light. Different positions of internal shapes, different proportions, different intensities of colour: on such subtle variations do these works depend. There is the persistent feeling of being very much on the threshold of something, perhaps something numinous.

In other rooms there are near-black paintings, a series of brown and grey acrylics on paper, another of black and grey. Though vertical in format, these paintings suggest landscape and weather, though they are really only about dividing up the rectangle and varying grey to blue, and brown to biscuity mud lightened with white. Refreshingly, there are no wall panels of intrusive information to distract the eye. We are left to study the paintings and each to discover our individual response to Rothko, whether anguished or uplifted, sacred or profane.

Most, I suspect, will feel obliged to manufacture a ‘spiritual’ reaction; not to, would be to admit a serious lack of sensitivity, and risk the label of coarseness or philistinism no modern exhibition-goer would readily countenance. My advice is to be tough-minded. If you see nothing there, say so. Far better that than to pretend.