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Just how powerful is art?
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Can it feel like love, or grief?
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Can it change your life? Can it change the world?
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****
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On February 25th, 1970,
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nine paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko
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arrived at London's Tate Gallery.
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A few hours earlier, on the same day,
Rothko's body was discovered,
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lying on the bathroom floor of his midtown studio.
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The painter,
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who'd spent so much time in his own mind
in the realms of the dead,
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had killed himself,
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and now, had in London
something like his own mausoleum.
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Which is why, in the spring of 1970,
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I didn't feel in much of a hurry
to see the newly installed paintings.
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A monument to another
fallen American abstract painter,
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it smacked too much of reverence.
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And we weren't into reverence that much,
not in 1970.
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We were into playtime. Andy Warhol!
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Rosenquist! Lichtenstein! Wham! Shazam!
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Preferably while listening to rock and roll
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and getting, well, not high-minded at any rate.
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The idea that art should be solemn was a turn-off,
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a bit like being made to go to church.
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The fact that Mark Rothko had joined the roll call
of suicidal abstract painters by killing himself
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only made the prospect more funereal.
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On the other hand,
I was keen to take another look at Francis Bacon.
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So, one morning, in the spring of 1970,
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into the Tate Gallery I went,
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walked down here and took a wrong right turn.
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And there they were. Lying in wait.
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No, it wasn't love at first sight.
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Rothko had insisted the lighting be kept
almost pretentiously low.
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It was like going into a cinema,
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expectation in the dimness.
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Something in there was doing
a steady throb, pulsing,
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like the inside of a body part,
all crimson and purple.
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I felt pulled through those black lines
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into some mysterious place in the universe.
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Rothko said his paintings begin
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an unknown adventure into an unknown space.
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I wasn't sure where I was being taken.
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I wasn't even sure I wanted to go.
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I only knew that I had no choice.
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And that the destination
might not exactly be a picnic.
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They say that money follows art.
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Well, art quite likes money, too.
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In fact, there's nothing a painter likes more
than a wealthy patron.
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So, Papal Rome had its Caravaggio,
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17th-century Amsterdam had its Rembrandt.
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When, in 1958,
the Canadian liquor company Seagram's
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wanted a painter to decorate
their New York headquarters,
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there was only one possible choice, Mark Rothko.
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The 55-year-old painter
was at the peak of his fame.
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Between 1954 and 1957,
his paintings had trebled in price.
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Representing America at the Venice Biennale,
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another five of his paintings
were on tour in Europe
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to prove to the world that the United States
had depth and not just dazzle.
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He was the greatest living American painter.
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Or so they said.
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In 1958, maybe,
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but he had gone through
30 years of financial hardship
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and mental struggle,
wrestling with the biggest question of all,
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''What could art do?''
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Could it cut through the white noise of daily life?
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Connect us with the basic emotions
that make us human,
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ecstasy, anguish, desire, terror?
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The architect of the Seagram Building
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approached Rothko
to do something for the Four Seasons,
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the ritzy restaurant that would occupy
the ground floor of the Manhattan skyscraper.
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In exchange for some
500-600 square feet of paintings,
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they agreed to pay Rothko $35,000.
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That's about two and a half million dollars today.
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As commissions go, they didn't come any bigger.
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Anyone else would have jumped at such an offer.
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But not Rothko.
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He thought long and hard about it,
talked to all his friends,
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turned it over and over in his mind.
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Why? Because he was ambivalent,
and not just about the commission,
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but about American capitalism,
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about his own American success story.
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Born in Russia in 1903,
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Rothko would later say
that as a child he could remember
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the local Cossacks
indulging in their favourite activity...
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Beating up Jews.
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In the first years of the 20th century,
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America opened its arms
to the Rothkowitzes from Dvinsk,
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as it did to millions of other Jews
coming through Ellis Island
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to the goldene medina, the golden city.
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Now, there were two kinds of Jews in America,
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those who plunged into the muck
and mayhem of business,
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and those who brought
with them from the Old World
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the most precious thing they had, culture.
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Rothkowitz Senior was the second kind.
A dreamy, bookish pharmacist,
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happier talking to his children about
Dostoyevsky and Dickens
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than doing the accounts.
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He scraped enough together to bring
little Marcus and the rest of the family
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out of the miseries of the old country
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and died of cancer six months later.
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The Rothkowitz children
were brought up by their mother, Anna.
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I knew this kind of kid, grew up with him.
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He went to Hebrew school,
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read every sort of book he could get his hands on,
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played not just the violin but the mandolin. Wow.
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Grownups called him a chochom, a know-it-all.
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Mark was the smart one,
the one who was going to make it.
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And he wanted to please his mother.
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He was just your super-educated,
ungainly, sentimental Jew,
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in the grip of mighty ideas
and desperate to tell you all about them.
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Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around,
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a big heart and a big mouth to match.
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You know the type.
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Rothko won a scholarship to Yale University,
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but Yale wasn't even sure it wanted Jews at all
and introduced a quota.
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Rothko quickly realised
you didn't need a sabre-wielding Cossack
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to feel unloved.
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He dropped out.
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But he never was the kind of Jew
who wanted to be a lawyer or a stockbroker.
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He was the other kind,
the one with the creative itch.
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The one who thought art could change the world.
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It's precisely because he really believed this
that, 30 years later,
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he couldn't walk away from the Seagram job,
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the greatest challenge of his career.
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Rothko rented a vast space
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at 222 Bowery, in an old gym.
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Every day, he'd arrive in the morning at 8:30,
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change into his painting clothes
and get down to work.
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As he started work in the spring of 1958,
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Rothko envisaged the Seagram murals
as a kind of wordless teaching.
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An antidote to the triviality of modern life.
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But what could they say?
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And how could they say it?
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One of the basic problems of the commission
was its sheer size.
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Everything that Rothko had done so far
had been on a human scale. Personal.
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But this was public. And Manhattan was watching.
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A picture lives by companionship,
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expanding and quickening
in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
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It dies by the same token.
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It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act
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to send it out into the world.
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Just like the old masters he so admired,
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Rothko prepared his canvases
with traditional rabbit-skin glue.
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He worked fast, and then would sit,
sometimes for hours, sometimes days.
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When someone asked, a few years later,
how long it took him to make one of his paintings,
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he replied, ''57 years. ''
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When he arrived here back in the 1920s,
of course, no one noticed.
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He was just another lost soul
in jazz-age New York.
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But then, he wasn't really
into bootleg and boogie-woogie.
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More like Marx and Mozart,
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he was burning to do something
about the modern world.
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Something in the opposite mood
to Busby Berkeley.
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Rothko had come to New York in 1923
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to ''wander around, bum about, and starve a bit,''
he later said.
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He enrolled in an art class
and, to make ends meet,
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taught kids at a Jewish community centre.
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When he stood in the Brooklyn classroom,
it all seemed so easy.
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He'd tell the children not to mind the rules.
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Painting, he said, was as natural as singing.
It should be like music.
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But when he tried, it came out as a croak.
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It's the work of a painfully knotted imagination.
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The trouble is he was doing something
the children didn't do,
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thinking too hard.
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So, he dabbled in expressionism.
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Thick dark paint.
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Sketchy lines.
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The thighs that ate Coney Island.
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No, not very good.
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''What are the roots that clutch"
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''What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?"
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''Son of man, you cannot say or guess"
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''For you know only a heap of broken images,
where the sun beats"
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''And the dead tree gives no shelter,
the cricket no relief"
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''And the dry stone no sound of water. ''
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The Subway series
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were the first paintings by Rothko
that catch you off-guard.
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Full of the bleak alienation of men
and women in TS Eliot's Waste Land,
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they have a compelling strangeness.
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He took an everyday urban scene
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and loaded it with a clammy sensation of doom.
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Are these commuters from Brooklyn
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or wandering souls trapped in purgatory?
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Orpheus looking for Eurydice
on the uptown D train.
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The architecture of the subway,
with its mournful rows of columns,
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snagged his attention.
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But the real action is going on
with the colours themselves.
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Look at the platform edge,
that brilliant crimson smear,
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and you can see what Rothko meant
when he called his colours performers.
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It was a dramatic departure
but getting there as a painter
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would take him another 20 years.
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In 1958, three months
into the Seagram commission,
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Rothko gave a lecture.
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It was the last time
he'd have anything to say about art
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and it's the closest insight we have
as to how he saw his painting.
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The tragic notion of the image
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is always present in my mind.
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I can't point it out.
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There are no skull and bones.
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''The whole problem of art,'' he said,
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''is to establish human values
in this specific civilisation.''
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Denying there was anything psychological
or internal or revelatory about his work,
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he said, ''No, no. It's about and of the world.''
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Then he went on to list all the ingredients
that make up a Rothko painting
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from sensuality through irony to death.
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''A sense of the tragic,'' he said,
''is always with me when I paint.''
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And it was this unbearably weighty feeling
for human tragedy
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that Rothko wanted to bring
into the Four Seasons.
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It would be his greatest project.
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I'm interested only
in expressing basic human emotions.
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Tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.
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And the fact that people break down
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and cry when confronted with my pictures
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shows that I communicate those basic emotions.
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But it always had been uphill for Rothko.
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The '30s hadn't exactly been the best time
to be an artist in New York.
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Not much of a market for painters,
struggling or otherwise.
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Though he had shortened and changed his name
from ''Marcus'' to ''Mark',
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and ''Rothkowitz'' to ''Rothko',
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he certainly hadn't found his way in painting.
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With every show he went to
at the Museum of Modern Art,
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Dada in '36, Picasso in '39,
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the modern masters made him
feel worse, floundering.
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Only Matisse's Red Studio,
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which he saw in 1949,
finally switched something on.
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Maybe it had something to do
with what Matisse did
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to liberate colour from specific objects.
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Things no longer have a colour, the painting does.
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But back in the '30s,
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Rothko was still thinking too hard
to paint like this.
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Instead of following his instinct,
he went back to his books.
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Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy,
Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.
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Great monolithic slabs of the big ideas
he chain-smoked his way through.
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And then he tried to get
the sense of tragic brutality,
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this is what humans do over and over again,
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down on canvas.
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No problem finding the tragic in these pictures.
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Myths and monsters, Syrian bulls, Egyptian hawks,
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half-men, half-beasts slither, hiss and peck,
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like an ancient frieze.
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Slaughter, sacrifice and disembowelment
by the yard.
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But Rothko's archaeological excursions
in the land of the dead
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were overtaken by the real world.
242
00:25:07,727 --> 00:25:09,524
The war happened.
243
00:25:14,967 --> 00:25:18,801
Not for Rothko, classified 4F,
244
00:25:18,887 --> 00:25:22,482
unfit for service due to acute short-sightedness.
245
00:25:24,447 --> 00:25:28,406
But Rothko knew the conflict
was a crossroads for art.
246
00:25:40,927 --> 00:25:44,636
With civilisation facing annihilation,
247
00:25:44,727 --> 00:25:49,403
it was up to America
to save Western culture from fascism.
248
00:25:49,487 --> 00:25:53,765
Not just by offering safe haven
to refugee painters from Europe,
249
00:25:55,487 --> 00:25:59,321
but by doing something brave, something fresh,
250
00:25:59,887 --> 00:26:03,084
something equal to the times.
251
00:26:05,127 --> 00:26:09,359
Easier said, and they said it a lot, than done.
252
00:26:10,767 --> 00:26:14,123
Barnett Newman, one of Rothko's closest friends,
253
00:26:14,207 --> 00:26:19,406
issues another manifesto
that sums up the way the group felt.
254
00:26:19,807 --> 00:26:23,925
''In the moral crisis of a world in shambles,''
he says,
255
00:26:24,007 --> 00:26:27,716
''it was no longer possible
to go on painting the old stuff."
256
00:26:27,807 --> 00:26:30,765
''Flowers, reclining nudes.''
257
00:26:30,847 --> 00:26:35,363
So Newman just gives up painting, for four years.
258
00:27:22,207 --> 00:27:24,675
By the spring of 1959,
259
00:27:24,767 --> 00:27:28,555
Rothko had almost completed work
on the Seagram job.
260
00:27:35,767 --> 00:27:40,363
Exhausted by his endeavour,
he took a three-month vacation to Europe
261
00:27:40,447 --> 00:27:42,597
with his wife and daughter.
262
00:27:53,527 --> 00:27:55,802
We get an insight into how he was feeling
263
00:27:55,887 --> 00:27:59,721
from a reported conversation he had at the bar
264
00:27:59,807 --> 00:28:02,116
on the transatlantic ocean liner.
265
00:28:02,207 --> 00:28:07,201
He railed against the ''sons of bitches''
who'd be dining beneath his art,
266
00:28:07,447 --> 00:28:11,406
hoped his paintings would ruin their appetite.
267
00:28:11,487 --> 00:28:16,277
Increasingly, he'd come to see the commission
as a gladiatorial contest,
268
00:28:16,367 --> 00:28:19,120
Mark versus Manhattan.
269
00:28:19,207 --> 00:28:23,166
He talked the talk
but it sounds a lot like Dutch courage.
270
00:28:23,247 --> 00:28:25,522
Defensive, anxious.
271
00:28:30,887 --> 00:28:36,996
Rothko had always wanted to give his paintings
the emotional force of the old masters.
272
00:28:38,727 --> 00:28:43,642
On a previous trip to Europe in 1950,
he'd done the grand tour.
273
00:28:43,727 --> 00:28:50,246
And in Florence, he'd visited what was to be
a major inspiration for the Seagram murals.
274
00:28:50,327 --> 00:28:54,286
Michelangelo's library
in the Church of San Lorenzo.
275
00:29:05,687 --> 00:29:08,520
After I'd been at work for some time,
276
00:29:08,607 --> 00:29:13,522
I realised that I was
much influenced subconsciously
277
00:29:13,607 --> 00:29:18,397
by Michelangelo's walls in the staircase room
278
00:29:19,007 --> 00:29:22,079
of the Medicean library in Florence.
279
00:29:23,807 --> 00:29:28,483
He achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after.
280
00:29:30,927 --> 00:29:33,236
He makes the viewers feel
281
00:29:33,327 --> 00:29:37,843
they are trapped in a room
where all the doors and windows are bricked up.
282
00:29:39,367 --> 00:29:43,076
So all they can do
is butt their heads against the wall
283
00:29:44,847 --> 00:29:46,121
forever.
284
00:29:54,607 --> 00:29:58,725
That was the feeling Mark Rothko
wanted to give to the people
285
00:29:58,807 --> 00:30:02,561
who'd soon be eating
in Manhattan's smartest restaurant.
286
00:30:07,727 --> 00:30:11,959
Rothko and the other New York artists
looked at America
287
00:30:12,087 --> 00:30:17,081
and found a country caught between
the bomb and the supermarket,
288
00:30:19,927 --> 00:30:22,680
Korea and the Cold War,
289
00:30:23,487 --> 00:30:26,240
paranoia and distraction.
290
00:30:28,327 --> 00:30:32,161
It was an unreal, manufactured way of life.
291
00:30:33,647 --> 00:30:37,162
So their paintings would fight back.
292
00:30:37,527 --> 00:30:40,963
They'd reconnect people with physical reality,
293
00:30:41,047 --> 00:30:44,357
with the truth of what it was to be human.
294
00:30:44,527 --> 00:30:47,724
And they'd do it in a totally new way.
295
00:30:51,607 --> 00:30:55,441
''After the Holocaust and the atom bomb,''
Rothko said,
296
00:30:55,527 --> 00:30:59,566
''you couldn't paint figures
without mutilating them.''
297
00:30:59,647 --> 00:31:02,878
So, could just colours and shapes
298
00:31:02,967 --> 00:31:05,686
move us the way Michelangelo had?
299
00:31:07,087 --> 00:31:11,205
De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko
all certainly thought so,
300
00:31:11,287 --> 00:31:17,203
abandoning painting things
to strive for a new, pure expression of feeling.
301
00:31:24,407 --> 00:31:27,524
At once visionary and revelatory,
302
00:31:27,607 --> 00:31:30,326
and like nothing in the history of art,
303
00:31:30,407 --> 00:31:33,763
a new world on the canvas.
304
00:31:36,567 --> 00:31:42,005
Rothko also said that paintings
needed to be miraculous.
305
00:31:42,087 --> 00:31:46,956
You could say that the world had never been
more badly in need of miracles.
306
00:31:54,007 --> 00:31:59,286
And what he was painting was,
for the first time, stunningly dramatic.
307
00:32:00,407 --> 00:32:04,844
Rothko's Multiforms have
a movement all of their own,
308
00:32:04,927 --> 00:32:09,239
swelling and dissolving, staining and seeping.
309
00:32:11,127 --> 00:32:14,756
Sometimes they seem to hover over the canvas
310
00:32:14,847 --> 00:32:18,396
as if we were looking down
at layers of coloured cloud,
311
00:32:18,487 --> 00:32:21,445
mysteriously blooming and fading.
312
00:32:22,887 --> 00:32:27,881
At other times,
the colours seem more stridently embattled.
313
00:32:28,487 --> 00:32:32,275
It was all very seductive, loose and pretty.
314
00:32:34,127 --> 00:32:36,880
Rothko started to sell,
315
00:32:36,967 --> 00:32:40,516
but he knew the difference
between prettiness and power.
316
00:32:41,967 --> 00:32:44,527
And it was power that he was after.
317
00:32:44,607 --> 00:32:49,920
The power to take people somewhere
they would recover their humanity.
318
00:32:50,807 --> 00:32:54,641
When they were first shown
in Manhattan in the 1950s,
319
00:32:54,727 --> 00:32:59,278
these big, spellbinding paintings
were immediately recognised
320
00:32:59,367 --> 00:33:01,722
as a body of work that made the case
321
00:33:01,807 --> 00:33:05,356
for American painting in an utterly new way.
322
00:33:05,447 --> 00:33:09,360
Emotionally stirring, sensuously addictive.
323
00:33:18,727 --> 00:33:23,323
Big vertical canvases of contrasting bars of colour.
324
00:33:26,287 --> 00:33:30,246
Panels of colour stacked up on top of each other,
325
00:33:30,327 --> 00:33:32,124
shimmering, glowing,
326
00:33:33,087 --> 00:33:37,877
beckoning you into some sort of
deep, undefined radiant yonder.
327
00:33:39,607 --> 00:33:44,601
Rothko had become the maker of paintings
as powerful and complicated
328
00:33:44,767 --> 00:33:49,761
as anything by his two gods,
Rembrandt and Turner.
329
00:33:52,647 --> 00:33:57,243
For me, these paintings
are the equivalent of those old masters.
330
00:33:57,327 --> 00:34:02,959
Like them, they emanate
an uncanny force field, so strongly magnetic
331
00:34:03,487 --> 00:34:06,320
that when you turn your back on them
or leave the room,
332
00:34:06,407 --> 00:34:09,399
you can still sense their presence.
333
00:34:12,127 --> 00:34:16,837
Quite suddenly, in 1949,
the new language of feeling
334
00:34:16,927 --> 00:34:20,158
Rothko had been groping towards for two decades
335
00:34:20,247 --> 00:34:23,159
finally revealed itself.
336
00:34:27,207 --> 00:34:29,437
To the Old World of art, Europe,
337
00:34:29,527 --> 00:34:33,520
where the veterans of modernism,
Salvador Dali, Picasso,
338
00:34:33,607 --> 00:34:37,441
were still pottering around to ever less effect,
339
00:34:37,527 --> 00:34:40,724
Rothko's paintings seemed to give the lie
340
00:34:40,807 --> 00:34:44,925
to anyone accusing American culture
of shallowness.
341
00:34:45,567 --> 00:34:51,563
For whatever else these throbbing paintings were,
they were unmistakably deep.
342
00:34:55,647 --> 00:34:59,162
Rothko had accomplished
something utterly original.
343
00:35:01,407 --> 00:35:05,685
It's not what the colours are
that makes the paintings work on our senses,
344
00:35:07,207 --> 00:35:10,119
it's what Rothko makes them do.
345
00:35:12,847 --> 00:35:17,841
While at first sight these paintings
seem so still and composed,
346
00:35:17,967 --> 00:35:21,482
hang around for a moment
and you'll see they're anything but.
347
00:35:21,607 --> 00:35:26,044
They're in motion, they seem to swell and breathe,
348
00:35:26,127 --> 00:35:29,597
and fill like sails catching the wind.
349
00:35:29,687 --> 00:35:33,646
They're not paintings that just
dumbly wait to be watched.
350
00:35:34,287 --> 00:35:36,198
They come and get us.
351
00:35:36,287 --> 00:35:40,599
And we surrender to total immersion.
352
00:35:53,087 --> 00:35:57,524
Often talked about as some kind of
transcendental philosopher,
353
00:35:57,607 --> 00:36:01,919
Rothko was at pains to deny ever being a mystic.
354
00:36:02,127 --> 00:36:05,881
''No,'' he said, ''what I'm giving you, what I love,"
355
00:36:05,967 --> 00:36:08,162
''is material experience,"
356
00:36:08,247 --> 00:36:12,479
''the sensuousness of the world in all its richness.''
357
00:36:16,087 --> 00:36:18,760
And none of this tantalising of the eye
358
00:36:18,847 --> 00:36:23,841
would work had Rothko not been
the most soft-edged of all painters.
359
00:36:26,047 --> 00:36:29,926
Look at how important those ragged borders are.
360
00:36:30,007 --> 00:36:32,726
Both at the perimeter of the whole picture,
361
00:36:32,807 --> 00:36:37,881
and in those torn seams
he cuts between the big colour zones.
362
00:36:40,847 --> 00:36:44,886
That inner light, mysterious and potent.
363
00:36:44,967 --> 00:36:49,961
When people beheld it, for hours
they could hold nothing else in their mind's eye.
364
00:36:57,647 --> 00:37:01,765
Rothko wanted an intimate,
personal connection to be made
365
00:37:01,847 --> 00:37:05,317
for his paintings to exert their full power.
366
00:37:05,407 --> 00:37:10,162
A total control freak,
he had to be in charge of absolutely everything.
367
00:37:10,247 --> 00:37:14,479
Lighting, low. Position on the wall, even lower.
368
00:37:14,607 --> 00:37:18,282
When somebody asked him
how close to the pictures they should stand,
369
00:37:18,367 --> 00:37:22,963
he answered right back, ''Oh, about 18 inches.''
370
00:37:31,647 --> 00:37:37,882
Between 1954 and 1957,
the prices for Rothko's paintings trebled.
371
00:37:38,447 --> 00:37:41,519
The big museums down the street from his studio,
372
00:37:41,607 --> 00:37:43,996
that he'd attacked in the 1930s,
373
00:37:44,087 --> 00:37:46,999
now all wanted a piece of him.
374
00:37:47,087 --> 00:37:51,239
Buyers who were busy creating collections
of modern American masters,
375
00:37:51,327 --> 00:37:53,477
now had to have a Rothko
376
00:37:53,567 --> 00:37:58,163
along with their Pollocks, their de Koonings
and their Klines.
377
00:37:58,247 --> 00:38:03,241
So, did this mean that Mark Rothko
finally could relax a little?
378
00:38:03,447 --> 00:38:07,156
Bask in the glow of his success? Did it hell!
379
00:38:11,527 --> 00:38:16,521
It was vital to him
that his pictures were not sedatives.
380
00:38:16,967 --> 00:38:20,960
In the 1950s,
people were always being told to relax.
381
00:38:21,047 --> 00:38:24,835
Well, Rothko didn't want his pictures
to be like a massage.
382
00:38:24,927 --> 00:38:27,760
They were, he said, the opposite of restful.
383
00:38:27,847 --> 00:38:31,886
Tragic performances, violent, sacrificial,
384
00:38:31,967 --> 00:38:36,643
evoking the most extreme sensations
of doom and ecstasy.
385
00:38:39,327 --> 00:38:44,321
One does not paint
for design students or historians
386
00:38:44,647 --> 00:38:46,524
but for human beings.
387
00:38:54,207 --> 00:38:58,041
And the reaction in human terms
388
00:38:58,607 --> 00:39:03,601
is the only thing
that is really satisfactory to the artist.
389
00:39:16,607 --> 00:39:18,882
I think what he feared most of all
390
00:39:18,967 --> 00:39:22,004
was to be told how very beautiful
his pictures were,
391
00:39:22,087 --> 00:39:26,126
even though they were, and are, exactly that.
392
00:39:29,887 --> 00:39:34,597
Because the ''B'' word rang alarm bells
that they might be treated as no more
393
00:39:34,687 --> 00:39:37,838
than interior decoration for the rich.
394
00:40:16,287 --> 00:40:19,597
The people who weep before my paintings
395
00:40:22,207 --> 00:40:26,997
are having the same religious experience
I had when I painted them.
396
00:40:33,047 --> 00:40:38,041
So, what was he doing, signing up for
the ultimate job in interior decoration,
397
00:40:38,687 --> 00:40:41,997
supplying paintings
to the Four Seasons restaurant?
398
00:40:42,087 --> 00:40:43,600
The place where he said,
399
00:40:43,687 --> 00:40:48,124
''The richest bastards in New York
would come to feed and show off.''
400
00:40:48,887 --> 00:40:53,563
Was it a shameful sellout of all
his most adamantly held principles?
401
00:40:53,727 --> 00:40:57,242
Or was Rothko, in effect,
throwing down the gauntlet,
402
00:40:57,327 --> 00:41:00,125
saying, ''Right, eat this!''
403
00:41:03,927 --> 00:41:08,876
Now the Four Seasons isn't just a guzzling trough
for the Tiffany classes.
404
00:41:09,047 --> 00:41:11,766
It occupies the ground floor of a skyscraper
405
00:41:11,847 --> 00:41:15,522
designed by the darling
of the modernist International Style,
406
00:41:15,607 --> 00:41:17,199
Mies van der Rohe.
407
00:41:18,167 --> 00:41:20,727
Whatever else you can say
about the Seagram Building,
408
00:41:20,807 --> 00:41:25,119
the corporate headquarters
of the Canadian liquor giant,
409
00:41:25,207 --> 00:41:26,799
it isn't vulgar.
410
00:41:29,607 --> 00:41:34,601
Slender and razor sharp,
the building broods over midtown Manhattan.
411
00:41:38,047 --> 00:41:41,119
Inside, the Four Seasons itself,
412
00:41:41,207 --> 00:41:46,235
its half-sunken floor, fig trees,
reflecting pools and modernist furniture
413
00:41:46,807 --> 00:41:51,039
aspire to a kind of understated Neo-classicism.
414
00:41:52,727 --> 00:41:55,685
An urban villa for the Vogue set.
415
00:41:59,047 --> 00:42:03,120
Still, whichever way you cut it, it was a restaurant.
416
00:42:03,207 --> 00:42:06,244
A four-and-a-half-million dollar restaurant.
417
00:42:19,407 --> 00:42:22,240
But it wasn't quite that simple.
418
00:42:22,967 --> 00:42:27,961
There were things about the commission
that were flattering, challenging in a positive way.
419
00:42:28,567 --> 00:42:33,038
The fact that there were now all those
glamorous apartments with his pictures in them
420
00:42:33,127 --> 00:42:37,518
sharpened Rothko's need
to work in some sort of public space.
421
00:42:37,607 --> 00:42:41,885
Make it over into
what he called ''a place', his place.
422
00:42:43,087 --> 00:42:46,079
What bigger test could there be?
423
00:42:46,167 --> 00:42:50,001
If it was haute cuisine versus art, his art,
424
00:42:50,087 --> 00:42:53,636
the truffled sole meuniére didn't stand a chance.
425
00:42:54,407 --> 00:42:57,399
Art would vanquish appetite.
426
00:42:59,687 --> 00:43:04,158
His series of darkly glowing paintings,
tightly packed together,
427
00:43:04,247 --> 00:43:08,001
would hang four and a half feet up on those walls,
428
00:43:08,087 --> 00:43:12,558
looming over the diners,
swallowing the swallowers.
429
00:43:12,647 --> 00:43:17,357
His whole desire was to replace
those restaurant walls altogether.
430
00:43:17,447 --> 00:43:21,042
Something profound would happen
to the vain and the shallow
431
00:43:21,127 --> 00:43:25,359
as they tucked into their caviar
and their lobster thermidor,
432
00:43:25,447 --> 00:43:28,962
as they surrendered to the power of art, his art.
433
00:43:48,007 --> 00:43:53,035
Early in 1959, like some omnipotent sorcerer,
434
00:43:53,127 --> 00:43:56,085
Rothko painted Red on Maroon,
435
00:43:56,167 --> 00:44:00,479
one of the most dramatic of the murals
destined for the Four Seasons.
436
00:44:06,007 --> 00:44:11,001
With the vision of Michelangelo's
blind windows burnt on his retina,
437
00:44:11,287 --> 00:44:13,847
he turned his paintings on their side.
438
00:44:17,727 --> 00:44:22,562
Instead of uprights,
they were now expansive horizontals.
439
00:44:24,447 --> 00:44:28,122
What had been shutter-like bars
of darkness and light
440
00:44:28,207 --> 00:44:31,677
became something akin to load-bearing columns.
441
00:44:38,367 --> 00:44:41,996
And the load they were bearing
was human history.
442
00:44:47,407 --> 00:44:51,002
That autumn,
months after the glamorous opening,
443
00:44:51,087 --> 00:44:55,603
he and his wife, Mell,
went to eat at the Four Seasons.
444
00:44:59,527 --> 00:45:04,647
Rothko was someone who thought it was immoral
to spend more than five bucks on a meal,
445
00:45:04,727 --> 00:45:08,163
and was often perfectly happy
with a Chinese takeaway,
446
00:45:08,247 --> 00:45:10,283
the cheaper the better.
447
00:45:10,887 --> 00:45:17,042
But as he sat among the millionaires with Mell,
his heart and his confidence sank like a stone.
448
00:45:22,087 --> 00:45:26,763
Anybody who will eat that kind of food
for that kind of money
449
00:45:28,327 --> 00:45:31,000
will never look at a painting of mine.
450
00:45:42,727 --> 00:45:46,436
The next morning,
he looked at the 30 or so paintings,
451
00:45:47,967 --> 00:45:50,197
some of the most beautiful and moving things
452
00:45:50,287 --> 00:45:54,166
not only Rothko
but any modern artist had ever created,
453
00:45:56,367 --> 00:45:59,484
and saw only the ruin of a great project.
454
00:46:05,687 --> 00:46:09,123
His paintings would never hang
in the Four Seasons.
455
00:46:11,167 --> 00:46:13,920
Manhattan had beaten Mark.
456
00:46:19,367 --> 00:46:23,076
Or had art triumphed over money?
457
00:46:23,847 --> 00:46:26,202
After all, how many artists do you know
458
00:46:26,287 --> 00:46:30,166
who would say no
to two and a half million dollars?
459
00:46:45,287 --> 00:46:49,485
Rothko had made sure his contract
gave him ownership of the pictures
460
00:46:49,567 --> 00:46:51,444
if the job went sour.
461
00:46:55,967 --> 00:46:59,164
It was almost as if he always hoped that one day,
462
00:46:59,247 --> 00:47:03,923
somewhere else perhaps,
he would be able to resurrect his idea
463
00:47:04,007 --> 00:47:06,680
to make a space his space.
464
00:47:23,247 --> 00:47:26,484
Later that year, a
curator came to invite him
465
00:47:26,485 --> 00:47:29,720
to exhibit in the Kassel
art fair in Germany.
466
00:47:47,647 --> 00:47:49,842
When I was a younger man,
467
00:47:51,007 --> 00:47:52,963
art was a lonely thing.
468
00:47:55,207 --> 00:47:58,199
No galleries, no collectors,
469
00:48:00,727 --> 00:48:01,842
no critics.
470
00:48:03,727 --> 00:48:05,126
No money.
471
00:48:05,927 --> 00:48:07,918
Yet it was a golden age.
472
00:48:10,207 --> 00:48:14,803
For we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
473
00:48:20,647 --> 00:48:23,002
Today, it is not quite the same.
474
00:48:24,287 --> 00:48:27,643
It is a time of tonnes of verbiage,
475
00:48:28,367 --> 00:48:31,120
activity, consumption.
476
00:48:38,847 --> 00:48:42,362
Which condition is better for the world at large,
477
00:48:43,847 --> 00:48:46,202
I will not venture to discuss.
478
00:48:47,207 --> 00:48:48,686
But I do know
479
00:48:50,047 --> 00:48:53,084
that many of those who are driven to this life
480
00:48:54,127 --> 00:48:58,006
are desperately searching
for those pockets of silence,
481
00:49:00,207 --> 00:49:03,961
where we can root and grow.
482
00:49:11,367 --> 00:49:14,120
We must all hope we find them.
483
00:49:20,627 --> 00:49:23,913
The man who'd taken a stand
for art over money made
484
00:49:23,913 --> 00:49:25,721
the German an offer.
485
00:49:30,087 --> 00:49:34,046
''If you build a chapel of expiation
for the Holocaust,'' he said,
486
00:49:34,127 --> 00:49:38,200
''it need only be a tent,
I'll paint you something for free. ''
487
00:49:42,887 --> 00:49:44,718
It never happened.
488
00:49:57,487 --> 00:50:02,481
Mark Rothko spent the next ten years,
all that he had left of his life,
489
00:50:02,567 --> 00:50:05,764
searching for that perfect wayside chapel
490
00:50:05,847 --> 00:50:10,841
where he could realise the vision
that had been frustrated at the Four Seasons.
491
00:50:10,927 --> 00:50:14,806
A one-man show in 1961
at the Museum of Modern Art,
492
00:50:14,887 --> 00:50:19,165
which he went to every single day,
brought him some cheer.
493
00:50:19,247 --> 00:50:22,842
And his work was selling better than ever.
494
00:50:22,927 --> 00:50:27,159
But with success, his life actually got shabbier.
495
00:50:27,247 --> 00:50:30,444
His tippling, which began at 10:00 in the morning,
496
00:50:30,527 --> 00:50:33,519
developed into serious alcoholism.
497
00:50:33,607 --> 00:50:39,603
And his chain-smoking, a lifelong habit,
brought him heart and lung problems,
498
00:50:39,687 --> 00:50:43,396
and his second marriage was breaking up.
499
00:50:44,407 --> 00:50:49,925
Shadowed by melancholy,
his work got darker and more intense,
500
00:50:50,007 --> 00:50:53,363
just as modern art was going pop.
501
00:50:56,047 --> 00:50:58,383
For Rothko, painting had always been
502
00:50:58,384 --> 00:51:01,758
an alternative to pop
culture, not its accomplice.
503
00:51:03,847 --> 00:51:07,203
But this seemed to be
what the galleries wanted now.
504
00:51:08,487 --> 00:51:12,275
Stuck in the mode of painting
he'd been doing for 15 years,
505
00:51:12,407 --> 00:51:15,365
he was defensive, angry.
506
00:51:21,047 --> 00:51:24,517
So when he did break out of his old style,
507
00:51:24,607 --> 00:51:29,556
it was to go raven black. As black as Texas oil.
508
00:52:01,087 --> 00:52:03,555
Texas finally provided Rothko
509
00:52:03,647 --> 00:52:07,799
with the chance to realise the vision
thwarted in the Four Seasons.
510
00:52:12,927 --> 00:52:18,559
Art patrons John and Dominique de Menil
commissioned him to produce a set of murals
511
00:52:18,647 --> 00:52:22,526
for a chapel to be built in Houston in 1965,
512
00:52:26,167 --> 00:52:30,160
giving Rothko freedom
to install exactly what he wanted.
513
00:52:36,247 --> 00:52:41,241
If the Four Seasons paintings were content
to make a gesture at the other world,
514
00:52:41,367 --> 00:52:44,757
the Houston chapel buries you in a tomb.
515
00:52:45,487 --> 00:52:48,604
Tanks of ink have been spilled
trying to persuade us
516
00:52:48,687 --> 00:52:52,441
that this place is not as dark
and funereal as it seems.
517
00:52:52,767 --> 00:52:57,602
A systematic dimming of the light
that had always burned intensely
518
00:52:57,687 --> 00:53:00,360
in Rothko's greatest works.
519
00:53:00,447 --> 00:53:05,965
But, quite honestly, sitting here,
do we feel bright and beautiful?
520
00:53:06,567 --> 00:53:08,046
I'm not sure.
521
00:53:15,847 --> 00:53:18,441
Those rippling edges, flaring with light,
522
00:53:18,527 --> 00:53:23,282
which gave Rothko's pictures
so much of their movement, have gone.
523
00:53:24,767 --> 00:53:27,645
In their place, an inky night.
524
00:53:36,047 --> 00:53:41,041
It's almost as though he's painting
to see how dark he can make the light.
525
00:53:44,567 --> 00:53:46,000
Good luck
526
00:53:47,767 --> 00:53:49,485
and good night?
527
00:53:52,287 --> 00:53:57,805
It's hard not to feel the Houston chapel
isn't some sort of live burial.
528
00:53:57,887 --> 00:54:03,883
An interment not just of Rothko's future
but of his hopes for art.
529
00:54:12,367 --> 00:54:16,440
Then, into the blackness,
in painting after painting,
530
00:54:16,527 --> 00:54:19,121
came a luminous zone of milky grey.
531
00:54:24,167 --> 00:54:27,398
Like the rim of a planet lit by the moon.
532
00:54:28,687 --> 00:54:32,475
As if Rothko was already gone,
off into deep space,
533
00:54:33,207 --> 00:54:35,880
presiding over the moment of creation.
534
00:54:38,487 --> 00:54:43,356
Dividing the light from the darkness,
the earth from the heavens,
535
00:54:43,447 --> 00:54:46,484
bent on heroic self-cremation.
536
00:54:54,127 --> 00:54:58,086
So you see, I got it all wrong,
that morning in 1970.
537
00:55:04,287 --> 00:55:09,839
I'd thought seeing the Seagram paintings
would be like a trip to the cemetery of abstraction.
538
00:55:09,927 --> 00:55:13,124
All dutiful reverence. A dead end.
539
00:55:24,167 --> 00:55:27,125
Look at this one. What do you see?
540
00:55:30,087 --> 00:55:33,523
A hanging veil suspended between two columns?
541
00:55:39,047 --> 00:55:42,483
An opening that beckons or denies entrance?
542
00:55:45,927 --> 00:55:47,485
A blind window?
543
00:55:50,007 --> 00:55:52,441
For me, it's a gateway.
544
00:56:02,087 --> 00:56:05,045
If some of those portals are blocked,
545
00:56:05,127 --> 00:56:09,439
others open into the unknown space
that Rothko talked about,
546
00:56:09,527 --> 00:56:13,236
the place that only art can take us.
547
00:56:13,327 --> 00:56:17,115
Far away from the buzzing static of the moment
548
00:56:17,207 --> 00:56:20,756
and towards the music of the spheres.
549
00:56:25,847 --> 00:56:29,681
Everything Rothko did to these paintings,
550
00:56:29,807 --> 00:56:33,436
the column-like forms suggested
rather than drawn,
551
00:56:33,527 --> 00:56:38,078
the loose stainings, were all meant
to make the surface ambiguous.
552
00:56:39,647 --> 00:56:41,000
Porous.
553
00:56:41,847 --> 00:56:44,202
Perhaps softly penetrable.
554
00:56:46,687 --> 00:56:50,236
A space that might be where we came from,
555
00:56:50,327 --> 00:56:52,477
or where we will end up.
556
00:57:02,367 --> 00:57:05,962
They're meant not to keep us out, but to embrace.
557
00:57:10,327 --> 00:57:15,321
From an artist whose highest compliment
was to call you a human being.
558
00:57:22,127 --> 00:57:25,244
Can anything be less cool than this room
559
00:57:25,327 --> 00:57:27,397
in the heart of Tate Modern?
560
00:57:27,487 --> 00:57:31,321
Further away from the razzle dazzle
of contemporary art,
561
00:57:31,407 --> 00:57:34,205
the frantic hustle of now.
562
00:57:34,287 --> 00:57:38,041
This isn't about now, this is about forever.
563
00:57:38,567 --> 00:57:41,843
This is a place where
you come to sit in the low light
564
00:57:41,927 --> 00:57:44,646
and feel the aeons rolling by,
565
00:57:44,727 --> 00:57:50,916
to be taken towards the gates that open
onto the thresholds of eternity,
566
00:57:51,247 --> 00:57:55,877
to feel the poignancy of our comings
and our goings,
567
00:57:56,047 --> 00:58:00,518
our entrances and our exits,
our births and our deaths.
568
00:58:00,607 --> 00:58:04,520
Womb, tomb and everything between.
569
00:58:04,607 --> 00:58:08,646
Can art ever be more complete, more powerful?
570
00:58:08,727 --> 00:58:10,399
I don't think so.
571
00:58:14,675 --> 00:58:18,675
***