The 15 Seagram Murals were originally commissioned for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building New York. Though the original commission was for 7 paintings, Rothko painted 30 canvases in total. The sheer number is testament to his full involvement in the project, despite withdrawing at the last stage.
There has been much speculation about Rothko’s change of heart. Why did he decide that the sleek and elitist restaurant was the wrong environment for his paintings? Why did he accept the commission in the first place?
In private he was supposed to have confessed his malevolent motivation to use his art to make dining an unpleasant experience for America’s ‘Rich Bastards’. It has also been said that he thought the murals would be hung in the employers’ canteen, an idea more acceptable to his left-wing principles. Rothko instead donated 9 of the murals to Tate and now, for a time, they can be viewed in the context of five others.
The nine rooms are designed to be viewed in order, to experience the developments in Rothko’s work to full effect. Before viewing the Seagram murals, in Room 2 you see Four Darks in Red (1958) which belongs to a group of works which immediately precedes the Seagram commission.
The composition of this painting is consistent with Rothko's signature style of stacking vertical blocks of colour in layers on a monochrome background. Not the bright colours he had used before, here he is more subdued, using a spectrum of reds, maroons and blacks. This marks the beginning of Rothko’s darkening palette.
Room Three is the focal gallery and where the Seagram Murals are hung high in dimmed lighting as Rothko intended. Although the room is large, the effect is a submerging into a womb-like or wound-like encasement of such emotional intensity that the reds and maroons give off a frantic heat. It is what Rothko would call a ‘total experience.’ For total impact the only comparison could be Monet’s Waterlillies in the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Adding to the effect is the sheer magnitude of the paintings but rather than intimidate, it is the size that draws you closer. Rothko once said: “To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However, when you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.”
It is at such close contact (Rothko himself suggested 50 cm) that you start to form your own relationship with the individual paintings, witnessing the subtle variations and dialogues between each of the canvases. Within a comparatively narrow compositional scheme, Rothko experimented with varying permutations of the floating 'frame' and its background.
The paintings, arranged to compare ‘like with like’, vary in form too. Some are architectural, resembling windows and doors and others more an experiment in the subtle shifts of complex emotion.
But the paintings must be viewed as a single coherent body of work in series. At their heart are strategies of repetition and variation on a theme, encapsulated in Rothko's statement that 'If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again – exploring it, probing it, demanding by its repetition that the public look at it.'
Notoriously private about his work, questions about his technique could not be answered until recently. In Room 4 Tate Conservators in conjunction with MOLAB (the Mobile Laboratory) use their research using UV lights to shed more light on the Tate’s Seagram Murals 'material' history and what this can tell us about Rothko's approach to painting.
The paintings in Room 6 immediately strike you as pure black rectangles but these require more attention to both texture and tone. Prolonged contemplation reveals the slow build-up of the surface through multiple layers.
Rather than annhialating colour and light, the Black-Form paintings illuminate velvety depths with opaque surfaces that absorb and reflect light. Rothko considered his work to be spiritual and wanted others to contemplate and be moved by it. Another room shows paintings that were commissioned for a chapel in Houston, Texas.
Rothko began work on the series Brown and Grey (Room 8) in 1968. The white borders around the edge of this series, gives more of a contained sensation, almost as if the artist wanted to protect his viewers from his exhausting work. Rothko went on to stress the conceptual importance of this technique.
At this time his own mental state was deteriorating and earlier in the year he suffered an aortic aneurysm that forced him to stop working altogether for several weeks. Doctors advised him to stop working on his large paintings, which required such physical exertion.
The final room requires re-entry into Room 3 where we are forced to re-assess the Seagram murals in light of what we have just seen. In Room 9 the Black on Grey series Rothko continues to expand and probe his artistic boundaries; Rothko refused to be complacent with his artistic success, answering the critics that would label him as superficial and purely decorative.
Yet, despite commercial success, it was only following his suicide that some critics reviewed this damning stance. Rothko himself hoped his work was ‘intimate and human.’ This one-off exhibition is both of these and more.
‘We have been fortunate enough to get incredible loans from other collections around the world,” said Achim Borchardt-Hume, curator of the Rothko exhibition. “It is because of the unique nature of this exhibition that we have agreed to bring these together. It will only happen once and that will be it.”
