Rothko from two sides

Two markedly different takes on the installation of the just-opened Rothko show (blogged earlier here) at Tate Modern.

From Adrian Searle in the Guardian

The dim lighting and contained feeling of the Rothko Room at the Tate has always given it, for some spectators, an air of immanence and mystery. I prefer paintings in plain sight, without the heavy breathing, never mind the intimations of tragedy in the shape of Rothko's suicide at the age of 66. His death tends to obscure his achievements even more than the peculiarly low light levels he preferred for the work's display.

From Mark Hudson in the Telegraph

These pictures work best when they are hung in an enclosed space of the right scale, at low light levels - just as they have been shown at Tate Modern since 2006. In general, the lighting of Rothko's paintings is especially important because over time their condition has deteriorated, so that if they are over-lit you see areas of paint slick or sheen on the surface that completely destroys the illusion of immanence - rather in the way a snapshot is ruined by the reflection of the flashbulb in the subject's eyes.

Which is why I absolutely hated the installation of Tate Modern's new exhibition `Rothko's Late Series'. Tate's Seagram Murals are shown next to paintings borrowed from the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in an enormous gallery under relatively strong light in a way that utterly destroyed for me any feeling of atmospheric cohesion or unity.

Where Searle sees benefit in being able to see the effects of time and crappy restoration attempts on Rothko's work, Hudson sees an undermining of the paintings' impact. Ditto their discussion of the curators' decision to hang one work so both its front and verso can be seen:

Searle

The show makes a careful study of Rothko's technique, his materials and paint application. One painting, owned by the Tate, is shown alongside close-up photographs of details seen under ultraviolet light, revealing the complex layerings and reworkings the artist subjected his work to. The painting is displayed on a false wall, with an aperture behind that enables us to see the back of the canvas.

Hudson

The organizers are determined to knock the sacred on the head by emphasizing the status of his paintings as objects made of wood, canvas and paint, even going to far as to display one picture in such a way that we can walk behind it to look at the stretcher, lest we get it into our silly heads that there is something magical about what Rothko did. Turn up the houselights! Away with the smoke and mirrors! After all, they're only paintings.

In New Zealand we rarely get two critics' views on the same show (at least, while it's still on) but it's even more unusual to get criticism of the way shows are hung (at more than the most basic "too crammed" / "small but perfectly formed" level). I don't know if writers don't think the general public would be interested in the decisions curators have made, or if they're generally not interested themselves.

Not going quietly

I remember at the time of the McCahon survey 'A Question of Faith' talking with people who felt that the sentiment of the show - "the artist's spiritual quest, demonstrating how he explored questions of faith, doubt, hope and eventually despair" - was a bit pat, a too narrow way of viewing the late paintings.

I was reminded of this reading this recent interview with Kate Rothko Prizel, daughter of Mark Rothko, and her thoughts on the forthcoming Tate Modern Rothko show, which focuses on the later works:

'Seeing these paintings standing alone may have a very different effect on the audience,' she says. 'This time, there will be no side-by-side comparisons with the bright works of the 1950s, and [thus] the audience will not have a tendency to see the darkening colours as representing a change in his mood. With retrospectives, there is often a feeling [as you approach the monochromatic late works] that this was the ultimate walk towards his suicide. But look at them in isolation, and instead you simply feel something opening up before him. I do not connect any feeling of frustration in him at this time with a frustration over where his work was going. I see these paintings as a new beginning for him rather than a reflection of his mood.

'No one would deny that my father was very depressed towards the end of his life. I used to be very engrossed with that idea, too. There was a terrible tendency for me to see the paintings darkening, becoming less accessible emotionally, more hard-edged. I had a hard time separating them from his depression. But then I saw an exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, work that followed his completion of the paintings for the Rothko Chapel [commissioned by Dominique and Jean de Menil in the mid-1960s]. I hadn't been familiar with those works. It was a period when I wasn't in the studio a lot, and my father didn't have any at home. It was fascinating to see how those works had grown out of the chapel, and then how they led to the black and greys. That was the beginning of a whole new way of seeing for me.'