Rothko – The Director’s Cut

Having had chance to reflect on the Rothko show at Tate Modern, it gets to be the first post on my new blog. Any who know me will know of my obsession with Rothko over many years – for me, in its best moments, his painting opens up wordlessly  a territory that, without wishing to hurriedly name it, is a sort of pole star in my life.

In their essence, for me, his facades (they are not paintings really) are about what you feel standing in their presence, the way you encounter them, the way they change the atmosphere in the  room.

That said I found this review which captures a lot of what I felt about the current exhibition  – The Seagram Series: The Director’s Cut.

Beyond that I wanted to open up just one consideration which articulates why I consider his work so important. Here are two quotes from Rothko :

“The people who weep before my pictures, are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point.”

“When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer and terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity.”

In other words, his life’s obsession was to create  works that create an experience in the viewer that he was happy to call religious but at the same time he considered this experience an entirely human, material experience with no transcendental dimension / explanation lying beyond it. He didn’t call it a ‘religion without religion’ but for me his work points out a space worthy of further exploration for those of us seeking to create artistic contexts under that banner.