Just how powerful is art?
Can it feel like love, or grief?
Can it change your life? Can it change the world?
****
On February 25th, 1970,
nine paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko
arrived at London's Tate Gallery.
A few hours earlier, on the same day, Rothko's body was discovered,
lying on the bathroom floor of his midtown studio.
The painter,
who'd spent so much time in his own mind in the realms of the dead,
had killed himself,
and now, had in London something like his own mausoleum.
Which is why, in the spring of 1970,
I didn't feel in much of a hurry to see the newly installed paintings.
A monument to another fallen American abstract painter,
it smacked too much of reverence.
And we weren't into reverence that much, not in 1970.
We were into playtime. Andy Warhol!
Rosenquist! Lichtenstein! Wham! Shazam!
Preferably while listening to rock and roll
and getting, well, not high-minded at any rate.
The idea that art should be solemn was a turn-off,
a bit like being made to go to church.
The fact that Mark Rothko had joined the roll call of suicidal abstract painters by killing himself
only made the prospect more funereal.
On the other hand, I was keen to take another look at Francis Bacon.
So, one morning, in the spring of 1970,
into the Tate Gallery I went,
walked down here and took a wrong right turn.
And there they were. Lying in wait.
No, it wasn't love at first sight.
Rothko had insisted the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low.
It was like going into a cinema,
expectation in the dimness.
Something in there was doing a steady throb, pulsing,
like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple.
I felt pulled through those black lines
into some mysterious place in the universe.
Rothko said his paintings begin
an unknown adventure into an unknown space.
I wasn't sure where I was being taken.
I wasn't even sure I wanted to go.
I only knew that I had no choice.
And that the destination might not exactly be a picnic.
They say that money follows art.
Well, art quite likes money, too.
In fact, there's nothing a painter likes more than a wealthy patron.
So, Papal Rome had its Caravaggio,
17th-century Amsterdam had its Rembrandt.
When, in 1958, the Canadian liquor company Seagram's
wanted a painter to decorate their New York headquarters,
there was only one possible choice, Mark Rothko.
The 55-year-old painter was at the peak of his fame.
Between 1954 and 1957, his paintings had trebled in price.
Representing America at the Venice Biennale,
another five of his paintings were on tour in Europe
to prove to the world that the United States had depth and not just dazzle.
He was the greatest living American painter.
Or so they said.
In 1958, maybe,
but he had gone through 30 years of financial hardship
and mental struggle, wrestling with the biggest question of all,
''What could art do?''
Could it cut through the white noise of daily life?
Connect us with the basic emotions that make us human,
ecstasy, anguish, desire, terror?
The architect of the Seagram Building
approached Rothko to do something for the Four Seasons,
the ritzy restaurant that would occupy the ground floor of the Manhattan skyscraper.
In exchange for some 500-600 square feet of paintings,
they agreed to pay Rothko $35,000.
That's about two and a half million dollars today.
As commissions go, they didn't come any bigger.
Anyone else would have jumped at such an offer.
But not Rothko.
He thought long and hard about it, talked to all his friends,
turned it over and over in his mind.
Why? Because he was ambivalent, and not just about the commission,
but about American capitalism,
about his own American success story.
Born in Russia in 1903,
Rothko would later say that as a child he could remember
the local Cossacks indulging in their favourite activity...
Beating up Jews.
In the first years of the 20th century,
America opened its arms to the Rothkowitzes from Dvinsk,
as it did to millions of other Jews coming through Ellis Island
to the goldene medina, the golden city.
Now, there were two kinds of Jews in America,
those who plunged into the muck and mayhem of business,
and those who brought with them from the Old World
the most precious thing they had, culture.
Rothkowitz Senior was the second kind. A dreamy, bookish pharmacist,
happier talking to his children about Dostoyevsky and Dickens
than doing the accounts.
He scraped enough together to bring little Marcus and the rest of the family
out of the miseries of the old country
and died of cancer six months later.
The Rothkowitz children were brought up by their mother, Anna.
I knew this kind of kid, grew up with him.
He went to Hebrew school,
read every sort of book he could get his hands on,
played not just the violin but the mandolin. Wow.
Grownups called him a chochom, a know-it-all.
Mark was the smart one, the one who was going to make it.
And he wanted to please his mother.
He was just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew,
in the grip of mighty ideas and desperate to tell you all about them.
Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around,
a big heart and a big mouth to match.
You know the type.
Rothko won a scholarship to Yale University,
but Yale wasn't even sure it wanted Jews at all and introduced a quota.
Rothko quickly realised you didn't need a sabre-wielding Cossack
to feel unloved.
He dropped out.
But he never was the kind of Jew who wanted to be a lawyer or a stockbroker.
He was the other kind, the one with the creative itch.
The one who thought art could change the world.
It's precisely because he really believed this that, 30 years later,
he couldn't walk away from the Seagram job,
the greatest challenge of his career.
Rothko rented a vast space
at 222 Bowery, in an old gym.
Every day, he'd arrive in the morning at 8:30,
change into his painting clothes and get down to work.
As he started work in the spring of 1958,
Rothko envisaged the Seagram murals as a kind of wordless teaching.
An antidote to the triviality of modern life.
But what could they say?
And how could they say it?
One of the basic problems of the commission was its sheer size.
Everything that Rothko had done so far had been on a human scale. Personal.
But this was public. And Manhattan was watching.
A picture lives by companionship,
expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
It dies by the same token.
It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act
to send it out into the world.
Just like the old masters he so admired,
Rothko prepared his canvases with traditional rabbit-skin glue.
He worked fast, and then would sit, sometimes for hours, sometimes days.
When someone asked, a few years later, how long it took him to make one of his paintings,
he replied, ''57 years. ''
When he arrived here back in the 1920s, of course, no one noticed.
He was just another lost soul in jazz-age New York.
But then, he wasn't really into bootleg and boogie-woogie.
More like Marx and Mozart,
he was burning to do something about the modern world.
Something in the opposite mood to Busby Berkeley.
Rothko had come to New York in 1923
to ''wander around, bum about, and starve a bit,'' he later said.
He enrolled in an art class and, to make ends meet,
taught kids at a Jewish community centre.
When he stood in the Brooklyn classroom, it all seemed so easy.
He'd tell the children not to mind the rules.
Painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music.
But when he tried, it came out as a croak.
It's the work of a painfully knotted imagination.
The trouble is he was doing something the children didn't do,
thinking too hard.
So, he dabbled in expressionism.
Thick dark paint.
Sketchy lines.
The thighs that ate Coney Island.
No, not very good.
''What are the roots that clutch"
''What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?"
''Son of man, you cannot say or guess"
''For you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats"
''And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief"
''And the dry stone no sound of water. ''
The Subway series
were the first paintings by Rothko that catch you off-guard.
Full of the bleak alienation of men and women in TS Eliot's Waste Land,
they have a compelling strangeness.
He took an everyday urban scene
and loaded it with a clammy sensation of doom.
Are these commuters from Brooklyn
or wandering souls trapped in purgatory?
Orpheus looking for Eurydice on the uptown D train.
The architecture of the subway, with its mournful rows of columns,
snagged his attention.
But the real action is going on with the colours themselves.
Look at the platform edge, that brilliant crimson smear,
and you can see what Rothko meant when he called his colours performers.
It was a dramatic departure but getting there as a painter
would take him another 20 years.
In 1958, three months into the Seagram commission,
Rothko gave a lecture.
It was the last time he'd have anything to say about art
and it's the closest insight we have as to how he saw his painting.
The tragic notion of the image
is always present in my mind.
I can't point it out.
There are no skull and bones.
''The whole problem of art,'' he said,
''is to establish human values in this specific civilisation.''
Denying there was anything psychological or internal or revelatory about his work,
he said, ''No, no. It's about and of the world.''
Then he went on to list all the ingredients that make up a Rothko painting
from sensuality through irony to death.
''A sense of the tragic,'' he said, ''is always with me when I paint.''
And it was this unbearably weighty feeling for human tragedy
that Rothko wanted to bring into the Four Seasons.
It would be his greatest project.
I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions.
Tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.
And the fact that people break down
and cry when confronted with my pictures
shows that I communicate those basic emotions.
But it always had been uphill for Rothko.
The '30s hadn't exactly been the best time to be an artist in New York.
Not much of a market for painters, struggling or otherwise.
Though he had shortened and changed his name from ''Marcus'' to ''Mark',
and ''Rothkowitz'' to ''Rothko',
he certainly hadn't found his way in painting.
With every show he went to at the Museum of Modern Art,
Dada in '36, Picasso in '39,
the modern masters made him feel worse, floundering.
Only Matisse's Red Studio,
which he saw in 1949, finally switched something on.
Maybe it had something to do with what Matisse did
to liberate colour from specific objects.
Things no longer have a colour, the painting does.
But back in the '30s,
Rothko was still thinking too hard to paint like this.
Instead of following his instinct, he went back to his books.
Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.
Great monolithic slabs of the big ideas he chain-smoked his way through.
And then he tried to get the sense of tragic brutality,
this is what humans do over and over again,
down on canvas.
No problem finding the tragic in these pictures.
Myths and monsters, Syrian bulls, Egyptian hawks,
half-men, half-beasts slither, hiss and peck,
like an ancient frieze.
Slaughter, sacrifice and disembowelment by the yard.
But Rothko's archaeological excursions in the land of the dead
were overtaken by the real world.
The war happened.
Not for Rothko, classified 4F,
unfit for service due to acute short-sightedness.
But Rothko knew the conflict was a crossroads for art.
With civilisation facing annihilation,
it was up to America to save Western culture from fascism.
Not just by offering safe haven to refugee painters from Europe,
but by doing something brave, something fresh,
something equal to the times.
Easier said, and they said it a lot, than done.
Barnett Newman, one of Rothko's closest friends,
issues another manifesto that sums up the way the group felt.
''In the moral crisis of a world in shambles,'' he says,
''it was no longer possible to go on painting the old stuff."
''Flowers, reclining nudes.''
So Newman just gives up painting, for four years.
By the spring of 1959,
Rothko had almost completed work on the Seagram job.
Exhausted by his endeavour, he took a three-month vacation to Europe
with his wife and daughter.
We get an insight into how he was feeling
from a reported conversation he had at the bar
on the transatlantic ocean liner.
He railed against the ''sons of bitches'' who'd be dining beneath his art,
hoped his paintings would ruin their appetite.
Increasingly, he'd come to see the commission as a gladiatorial contest,
Mark versus Manhattan.
He talked the talk but it sounds a lot like Dutch courage.
Defensive, anxious.
Rothko had always wanted to give his paintings the emotional force of the old masters.
On a previous trip to Europe in 1950, he'd done the grand tour.
And in Florence, he'd visited what was to be a major inspiration for the Seagram murals.
Michelangelo's library in the Church of San Lorenzo.
After I'd been at work for some time,
I realised that I was much influenced subconsciously
by Michelangelo's walls in the staircase room
of the Medicean library in Florence.
He achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after.
He makes the viewers feel
they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.
So all they can do is butt their heads against the wall
forever.
That was the feeling Mark Rothko wanted to give to the people
who'd soon be eating in Manhattan's smartest restaurant.
Rothko and the other New York artists looked at America
and found a country caught between the bomb and the supermarket,
Korea and the Cold War,
paranoia and distraction.
It was an unreal, manufactured way of life.
So their paintings would fight back.
They'd reconnect people with physical reality,
with the truth of what it was to be human.
And they'd do it in a totally new way.
''After the Holocaust and the atom bomb,'' Rothko said,
''you couldn't paint figures without mutilating them.''
So, could just colours and shapes
move us the way Michelangelo had?
De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko all certainly thought so,
abandoning painting things to strive for a new, pure expression of feeling.
At once visionary and revelatory,
and like nothing in the history of art,
a new world on the canvas.
Rothko also said that paintings needed to be miraculous.
You could say that the world had never been more badly in need of miracles.
And what he was painting was, for the first time, stunningly dramatic.
Rothko's Multiforms have a movement all of their own,
swelling and dissolving, staining and seeping.
Sometimes they seem to hover over the canvas
as if we were looking down at layers of coloured cloud,
mysteriously blooming and fading.
At other times, the colours seem more stridently embattled.
It was all very seductive, loose and pretty.
Rothko started to sell,
but he knew the difference between prettiness and power.
And it was power that he was after.
The power to take people somewhere they would recover their humanity.
When they were first shown in Manhattan in the 1950s,
these big, spellbinding paintings were immediately recognised
as a body of work that made the case
for American painting in an utterly new way.
Emotionally stirring, sensuously addictive.
Big vertical canvases of contrasting bars of colour.
Panels of colour stacked up on top of each other,
shimmering, glowing,
beckoning you into some sort of deep, undefined radiant yonder.
Rothko had become the maker of paintings as powerful and complicated
as anything by his two gods, Rembrandt and Turner.
For me, these paintings are the equivalent of those old masters.
Like them, they emanate an uncanny force field, so strongly magnetic
that when you turn your back on them or leave the room,
you can still sense their presence.
Quite suddenly, in 1949, the new language of feeling
Rothko had been groping towards for two decades
finally revealed itself.
To the Old World of art, Europe,
where the veterans of modernism, Salvador Dali, Picasso,
were still pottering around to ever less effect,
Rothko's paintings seemed to give the lie
to anyone accusing American culture of shallowness.
For whatever else these throbbing paintings were, they were unmistakably deep.
Rothko had accomplished something utterly original.
It's not what the colours are that makes the paintings work on our senses,
it's what Rothko makes them do.
While at first sight these paintings seem so still and composed,
hang around for a moment and you'll see they're anything but.
They're in motion, they seem to swell and breathe,
and fill like sails catching the wind.
They're not paintings that just dumbly wait to be watched.
They come and get us.
And we surrender to total immersion.
Often talked about as some kind of transcendental philosopher,
Rothko was at pains to deny ever being a mystic.
''No,'' he said, ''what I'm giving you, what I love,"
''is material experience,"
''the sensuousness of the world in all its richness.''
And none of this tantalising of the eye
would work had Rothko not been the most soft-edged of all painters.
Look at how important those ragged borders are.
Both at the perimeter of the whole picture,
and in those torn seams he cuts between the big colour zones.
That inner light, mysterious and potent.
When people beheld it, for hours they could hold nothing else in their mind's eye.
Rothko wanted an intimate, personal connection to be made
for his paintings to exert their full power.
A total control freak, he had to be in charge of absolutely everything.
Lighting, low. Position on the wall, even lower.
When somebody asked him how close to the pictures they should stand,
he answered right back, ''Oh, about 18 inches.''
Between 1954 and 1957, the prices for Rothko's paintings trebled.
The big museums down the street from his studio,
that he'd attacked in the 1930s,
now all wanted a piece of him.
Buyers who were busy creating collections of modern American masters,
now had to have a Rothko
along with their Pollocks, their de Koonings and their Klines.
So, did this mean that Mark Rothko finally could relax a little?
Bask in the glow of his success? Did it hell!
It was vital to him that his pictures were not sedatives.
In the 1950s, people were always being told to relax.
Well, Rothko didn't want his pictures to be like a massage.
They were, he said, the opposite of restful.
Tragic performances, violent, sacrificial,
evoking the most extreme sensations of doom and ecstasy.
One does not paint for design students or historians
but for human beings.
And the reaction in human terms
is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist.
I think what he feared most of all
was to be told how very beautiful his pictures were,
even though they were, and are, exactly that.
Because the ''B'' word rang alarm bells that they might be treated as no more
than interior decoration for the rich.
The people who weep before my paintings
are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
So, what was he doing, signing up for the ultimate job in interior decoration,
supplying paintings to the Four Seasons restaurant?
The place where he said,
''The richest bastards in New York would come to feed and show off.''
Was it a shameful sellout of all his most adamantly held principles?
Or was Rothko, in effect, throwing down the gauntlet,
saying, ''Right, eat this!''
Now the Four Seasons isn't just a guzzling trough for the Tiffany classes.
It occupies the ground floor of a skyscraper
designed by the darling of the modernist International Style,
Mies van der Rohe.
Whatever else you can say about the Seagram Building,
the corporate headquarters of the Canadian liquor giant,
it isn't vulgar.
Slender and razor sharp, the building broods over midtown Manhattan.
Inside, the Four Seasons itself,
its half-sunken floor, fig trees, reflecting pools and modernist furniture
aspire to a kind of understated Neo-classicism.
An urban villa for the Vogue set.
Still, whichever way you cut it, it was a restaurant.
A four-and-a-half-million dollar restaurant.
But it wasn't quite that simple.
There were things about the commission that were flattering, challenging in a positive way.
The fact that there were now all those glamorous apartments with his pictures in them
sharpened Rothko's need to work in some sort of public space.
Make it over into what he called ''a place', his place.
What bigger test could there be?
If it was haute cuisine versus art, his art,
the truffled sole meuniére didn't stand a chance.
Art would vanquish appetite.
His series of darkly glowing paintings, tightly packed together,
would hang four and a half feet up on those walls,
looming over the diners, swallowing the swallowers.
His whole desire was to replace those restaurant walls altogether.
Something profound would happen to the vain and the shallow
as they tucked into their caviar and their lobster thermidor,
as they surrendered to the power of art, his art.
Early in 1959, like some omnipotent sorcerer,
Rothko painted Red on Maroon,
one of the most dramatic of the murals destined for the Four Seasons.
With the vision of Michelangelo's blind windows burnt on his retina,
he turned his paintings on their side.
Instead of uprights, they were now expansive horizontals.
What had been shutter-like bars of darkness and light
became something akin to load-bearing columns.
And the load they were bearing was human history.
That autumn, months after the glamorous opening,
he and his wife, Mell, went to eat at the Four Seasons.
Rothko was someone who thought it was immoral to spend more than five bucks on a meal,
and was often perfectly happy with a Chinese takeaway,
the cheaper the better.
But as he sat among the millionaires with Mell, his heart and his confidence sank like a stone.
Anybody who will eat that kind of food for that kind of money
will never look at a painting of mine.
The next morning, he looked at the 30 or so paintings,
some of the most beautiful and moving things
not only Rothko but any modern artist had ever created,
and saw only the ruin of a great project.
His paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons.
Manhattan had beaten Mark.
Or had art triumphed over money?
After all, how many artists do you know
who would say no to two and a half million dollars?
Rothko had made sure his contract gave him ownership of the pictures
if the job went sour.
It was almost as if he always hoped that one day,
somewhere else perhaps, he would be able to resurrect his idea
to make a space his space.
Later that year, a curator came to invite him
to exhibit in the Kassel art fair in Germany.
When I was a younger man,
art was a lonely thing.
No galleries, no collectors,
no critics.
No money.
Yet it was a golden age.
For we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
Today, it is not quite the same.
It is a time of tonnes of verbiage,
activity, consumption.
Which condition is better for the world at large,
I will not venture to discuss.
But I do know
that many of those who are driven to this life
are desperately searching for those pockets of silence,
where we can root and grow.
We must all hope we find them.
The man who'd taken a stand for art over money made
the German an offer.
''If you build a chapel of expiation for the Holocaust,'' he said,
''it need only be a tent, I'll paint you something for free. ''
It never happened.
Mark Rothko spent the next ten years, all that he had left of his life,
searching for that perfect wayside chapel
where he could realise the vision that had been frustrated at the Four Seasons.
A one-man show in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art,
which he went to every single day, brought him some cheer.
And his work was selling better than ever.
But with success, his life actually got shabbier.
His tippling, which began at 10:00 in the morning,
developed into serious alcoholism.
And his chain-smoking, a lifelong habit, brought him heart and lung problems,
and his second marriage was breaking up.
Shadowed by melancholy, his work got darker and more intense,
just as modern art was going pop.
For Rothko, painting had always been
an alternative to pop culture, not its accomplice.
But this seemed to be what the galleries wanted now.
Stuck in the mode of painting he'd been doing for 15 years,
he was defensive, angry.
So when he did break out of his old style,
it was to go raven black. As black as Texas oil.
Texas finally provided Rothko
with the chance to realise the vision thwarted in the Four Seasons.
Art patrons John and Dominique de Menil commissioned him to produce a set of murals
for a chapel to be built in Houston in 1965,
giving Rothko freedom to install exactly what he wanted.
If the Four Seasons paintings were content to make a gesture at the other world,
the Houston chapel buries you in a tomb.
Tanks of ink have been spilled trying to persuade us
that this place is not as dark and funereal as it seems.
A systematic dimming of the light that had always burned intensely
in Rothko's greatest works.
But, quite honestly, sitting here, do we feel bright and beautiful?
I'm not sure.
Those rippling edges, flaring with light,
which gave Rothko's pictures so much of their movement, have gone.
In their place, an inky night.
It's almost as though he's painting to see how dark he can make the light.
Good luck
and good night?
It's hard not to feel the Houston chapel isn't some sort of live burial.
An interment not just of Rothko's future but of his hopes for art.
Then, into the blackness, in painting after painting,
came a luminous zone of milky grey.
Like the rim of a planet lit by the moon.
As if Rothko was already gone, off into deep space,
presiding over the moment of creation.
Dividing the light from the darkness, the earth from the heavens,
bent on heroic self-cremation.
So you see, I got it all wrong, that morning in 1970.
I'd thought seeing the Seagram paintings would be like a trip to the cemetery of abstraction.
All dutiful reverence. A dead end.
Look at this one. What do you see?
A hanging veil suspended between two columns?
An opening that beckons or denies entrance?
A blind window?
For me, it's a gateway.
If some of those portals are blocked,
others open into the unknown space that Rothko talked about,
the place that only art can take us.
Far away from the buzzing static of the moment
and towards the music of the spheres.
Everything Rothko did to these paintings,
the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn,
the loose stainings, were all meant to make the surface ambiguous.
Porous.
Perhaps softly penetrable.
A space that might be where we came from,
or where we will end up.
They're meant not to keep us out, but to embrace.
From an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being.
Can anything be less cool than this room
in the heart of Tate Modern?
Further away from the razzle dazzle of contemporary art,
the frantic hustle of now.
This isn't about now, this is about forever.
This is a place where you come to sit in the low light
and feel the aeons rolling by,
to be taken towards the gates that open onto the thresholds of eternity,
to feel the poignancy of our comings and our goings,
our entrances and our exits, our births and our deaths.
Womb, tomb and everything between.
Can art ever be more complete, more powerful?
I don't think so.
***