The Rothko room at the Tate Modern is an underappreciated treat for gallery-goers. The room is dimly lit, and feels much like a dive into the depths of a somber maroon ocean– or at the very least, that is how I suspect the room is meant to feel. Instead, the central bench was filled with people on their phones, having lunch, or disciplining upset children. It felt like the gallery-goers were present because they assumed nothing important was in there, and thus it was an excellent place to take a break from all the art.
I suspect visitors would react in this way because Rothko’s later work is an expression of simplicity and monumentality that speaks to the human drama that Rothko became acquainted with over the course of his life. The murals of this room were designed for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York as a retort to the wealthy patrons that the Four Seasons would attract. Rothko intended for the deep blacks, reds, and maroons to make these bourgeois guests feel claustrophobic, as if the windows and doors had been sealed with brick. These swathes of color speak to a somber oppressiveness that gyrates and shifts along the blurred and uneven edges of each profound rectangle.
Ordinarily, stillness is attributed to Rothko’s later works, but the reflection of each spotlight transforming the color of Rothko’s work makes these in particular feel like they are writhing. Most of the works are simple and symmetrical, but they strike me as being an unexpected stroke of profundity in a museum that otherwise caters to movement and interaction.
I’m glad that Rothko pulled out of his deal with the Four Seasons and sent these works across the sea to London, as in New York they would have been pearls before capitalist swine (Rothko was very leftist in philosophy). However, I can’t help but think that there’s perhaps a better resting place for this set of holy ghosts. I think to the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas as a proper place for somber contemplation, the sort that these pieces demand of the viewer. I know that this is wishful thinking.
For an excellent explanation of Rothko’s works, check out the Art Assignment’s “The Case for Mark Rothko”
Art and Glory 