INCHOATE THOUGHTS
ⓒ James Scott 2009.
Courtesy of the William Scott Foundation
December 10, 2011
Rothko in Britain
Whitechapel Gallery, London
September 9, 2011 – February 26, 2012
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first large
exhibition of the works of Mark Rothko in Britain, held in the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961, the same institution has
organized a single gallery show. Its focus is just one painting, Rothko’s Light Red over
Black of 1957. I have yet to see a mature painting by Rothko that
disappoints—though some in museums are insensitively displayed—so
it is hardly surprising that this one work should so thoroughly and
convincingly command the space it occupies. Viewers are encouraged to recline
on beanbags before it, a considerate touch that acknowledges the demands the
painting makes of them if they accede to its implicit demand for unhurried
concentration of attention. While doing so, they can also listen to recorded
commentaries on headphones by a variety of luminaries who recall their
experiences of the 1961 exhibition. This might be enough in itself, but there
is more.
Curators have the great privilege of access to materials that
relate to the artworks in their care. These include correspondence with
collectors, scholars, dealers, and sometimes the authors of the works
themselves. Traces of business transactions, including dealers’ invoices, can
also find their way into curatorial files. Although scholarly researchers can
sometimes gain access to this material, it is rarely shown in public. The Tate,
thanks to the perspicacity of John Rothenstein,
acquired Light
Red over Black two years after its completion. The exhibition organizers
have persuaded the Tate to show the contents of the files. The result is an
extraordinarily informative display.
The correspondence between Rothenstein
and Sidney Janis, Rothko’s dealer in New York, reveals the fragile contingency
of the conditions of acquisition of Light Red over Black. Janis offered a customary
ten percent museum discount, so the Tate paid all of $4,500 for this great
work. Was the paint application thin enough so that the canvas might safely be
rolled for travel to London? Yes, Janis replied, though—perhaps fortunately—he
made arrangements for it to be crated with another stretched painting to be
delivered to London. Rothko’s own letter announces his pleasure at the
purchase. Then we see the later correspondence in which he offers as a gift to
the Tate a group of nine canvases originally intended for the Seagram Building
in New York. He had withdrawn from the commission when he (and surely others)
realized they were wholly unsuitable for a restaurant. He is to the point,
polite, and urbane.
This impression is strikingly reinforced by a group of
photographs made during Rothko’s visit to England in 1959. His enthusiastic
reception by at least some artists and arts administrators helped inspire the
respect and even affection he felt for Britain, which was to prompt the gift of
the Seagram paintings in 1968. This is not to claim that Rothko’s generous gift
was not without self-interest. His terms were clear. These paintings, which
could never be alienated, would ensure him a room to himself, like Picasso and
Giacometti, thereby asserting his newly earned status among the already
acknowledged great Moderns. It was a brilliant assertion of ambition on
Rothko’s part from which the knowing Tate worthies were ready to benefit no
less than was the artist.
In the 1959 photographs in Cornwall, Rothko appears with William
Scott. In contrast to the earnest, anxious Scott, casual in an
polo-necked shirt, Rothko is a gently overbearing presence from another world,
every inch the New York sophisticate, polite yet reserved in jacket and
fashionably narrow tie. He looks totally though resignedly—even
comfortably—out of place against a rough Cornish stonewall. In one photo
his young daughter, Kate, clings to him, anxiously eyeing the lens. In another,
at a rustic outdoor tea table crowded with pottery plates and mugs, he evokes
the shade of the worldly Pieter Breugel visiting the
so-called peasants in the sixteenth-century Flemish countryside.
Letters from those who saw him in Cornwall reveal the awe in
which some British artists held Rothko, and expose their squabbling and
jockeying for his attention. Patrick Heron complains that Peter Lanyon had
deliberately kept him from seeing more of Rothko than he could help by not
telling Rothko that he, Heron, was living and working in Cornwall (Rothko was
understandably oblivious) and had not pointed out his studio to Rothko, even
though Lanyon and Rothko had parked immediately in front of it. All this was
done, Heron suggests, so that Rothko might think that Heron didn’t particularly
want to see him, whereas he was in fact most anxious to spend as much time with
the great New York painter as possible.
The Tate’s purchase of Light Red over Black in 1959, Rothko’s Whitechapel show in 1961, and his extraordinary gift of the
Seagram Building paintings in 1968, quite overshadow the lionizing and
the petty jealousies occasioned by his 1959 trip to Cornwall. However, the
letters and photographs from that visit poignantly capture the
incommensurability of the two worlds concerned: the emergent giant of Abstract
Expressionist New York, and the British reticence of St. Ives, Cornwall, from
where—for all the undoubted accomplishments of Scott, Lanyon, Heron, and
others—only Barbara Hepworth survives unequivocally in the international
canon.
If Light Red over Black is not sufficient to exemplify that chasm, a
visit to Tate Modern to view the Seagram Building paintings in the light of Rothko in Britain,
can only confirm the scale and scope of Rothko’s achievement. Their dark cold
fires assuredly earned Rothko his place in the pantheon, for these are portals
to aniconic mysteries; the antechamber to the
infinite; afterimages of the blinding sight of
omnipotence. Of course two years later he was dead, so the last letters on view
at the Whitechapel are of condolence to his widow.
Given what Rothko must have seen in his mind’s eye, it is no
wonder that his own expression in the Cornish photos is so abstractedly
melancholic. We must thank the Whitechapel and the
Tate for opening the files and giving us a glimpse of that great, visionary
sadness.