08/10/12
Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals and the permanent display at Tate Modern
A room at Tate Modern dedicated specifically to Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals
http://www2.tate.org.uk/rothko/ – currently 6 paintings hang in this installation at Tate Modern, the oppressive room painted grey and softly lit as Rothko intended. Tate own 9 Seagram canvases in total.
Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 – a Russian Abstract Expressionist painter
The Seagram Murals were originally a commission for the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York. Rothko was to produce a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant, approx 50 sq m, a long and narrow room.
Rothko painted in all approx 40 works across 3 series, all gigantic canvases done in dark reds and browns.
According to “Rothko” by Jacob Baal-Teshuva, a Taschen publication,
“He used a warm palette of dark red and brown tones, breaking the horizontal structure of his pictures by turning them at 90 degree angles. In this way he created a work that would relate directly to the architecture of the room. The surfaces of colour recalled architectural elements, as columns, walls, doors and windows, giving the viewer a feeling of confinement, yet presenting him with an unreachable world beyond.”
The paintings were never hung in their intended home because Rothko withdrew from the commission, perhaps seeing that what he’d created would not suit a restaurant setting. Today it is impossible to recreate exactly what Rothko envisioned as many of the paintings are split up and in different parts of the world.
I visited Tate Modern recently and spent some time with the Seagram Murals. Tate says of this room that
“Rothko was influenced by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, with its blind windows and deliberately oppressive atmosphere. Rothko commented that Michelangelo ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall'”
I certainly felt the softening and relaxing atmosphere as I entered the room and on reflection I did feel somewhat trapped by the room, however there few people in the room at the time so space wasnt really an issue. I sat and stared at each painting for a good 5 minutes each, intrigued to know or experience what our society celebrates in these works.
I failed and I still don’t understand why these paintings are worth so much money and venerated in the way they are.
Yes, I like the colours, I like their softness, even the unexpected variance in tone across each painting (not something I’d noticed before in reproduced images) and I even enjoyed their size, which somehow was a bit intimidating. I concede that perhaps the artist was reaching me after all, his wish that the viewer be forced to contemplate each painting.
Perhaps in time, with further viewings I’ll begin to understand but for now I remain as bemused as I was before my visit.
10/10/12
At 3.25pm on Sunday 07/10/12, one of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals was defaced making headline news, after all Rothko’s paintings fetch huge sums of money. For instance according to an article in the Guardian on 08/10/10 by Ben Quinn a Rothko his Orange, Red, Yellow sold earlier this in New York for $86.9m (£53.8m) – the highest price ever fetched by a piece of contemporary art at auction.
Vladimir Umanets tagged the painting with the black ink in the bottom right hand corner, it appears to read: “Vladimir Umanets, a potential piece of yellowism.”
Umanets claims he engaged with the work and improved it, ultimately increasing its value. That he had done so in order to draw attention to what was going on in contemporary art.
So what is ‘Yellowism’? According to an article written by Julia Halperin and published in Blouin Artinfo,
“Yellowism is not art, and Yellowism isn’t anti-art,” Umanets told the Telegraph on Monday. “It’s an element of contemporary visual culture. It’s not an artistic movement. It’s not art, it’s not reality, it’s just Yellowism. The main difference between Yellowism and art is that in art you have got freedom of interpretation, in Yellowism you don’t have freedom of interpretation, everything is about Yellowism, that’s it.”
The full article can be seen at http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/831942/wtf-is-yellowism-a-guide-to-the-obscure-movement-behind-the
I fail to understand what Unmanets says about Yellowism even having read and re-read his statement and many other articles on this incident. I cannot believe that Unmanets think this is NOT a criminal act and that he hasn’t done anything wrong. Surely damaging another persons creative work is considered as criminal damage in the eyes of our society?
It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to unfold.
OCA Painting 1 Learning Log 