We are asked to look at Rothko's Seagram murals – “The mixing and merging of a limited colour range has been explored by many artists and the effect of building layers of transparent and opaque paints can create a sense of different picture planes.”
I decided to do some further research as to the background behind the murals.
The Seagram Murals are a series of large-scale works, painted in various shades of red, black and maroon. These are normally on display at the Tate Modern but, sadly, as the museum is undergoing building works, the "Rothko Room" is currently closed to the public. It was disappointing not to be able to see these works in the flesh, as I understand from research that the artist expected viewers to look at the work in a particular way. When the paintings were given to the Tate as a gift in the late 1960s, Rothko insisted on a permanent, exclusive room for his paintings with dim lighting and a dull background. His use of large canvases were designed to make the viewer "enveloped within" the painting and also stated that "To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
Originally, the Seagram Murals were commissioned by the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York but Rothko decided against completing his commission and handed his advance payment back. There are a number of theories about why he should have done this - one being that his original intent for the paintings was subversive, and a chance to upset and offend the patrons on one of the most prestigious and expensive restaurants in New York. John Fischer, an editor of Harper's magazine, wrote a book about Rothko entitled "Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man", based on conversations Fischer had with Rothko over drinks on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. Fischer claims that Rothko said "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room" and make patrons "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up".
It is thought that Rothko, who had visited Italy in 1959 was inspired in his designs by Michaelangelo's architecture in the part of the Laurentian Library in Florence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentian_Library. Jonathan Jones, in his article for the Guardian in 2002, describes the room as follows:
"The door off the cloister leads into a room higher than it is wide and starved of floor space by a dark grey staircase that sprawls into the room like an octopus. You feel pushed back to the sides of the room, where you look up at the walls and become conscious that this space is even more oppressive than it first appeared. The windows, with their massive corbels like flourishes in old books, are sealed: they are framed blanks leading the mind to expect light, air, the outside world, but instead offering no way out, in fact pushing forward into the room, which starts to seem heavier, smaller. The columns that apparently support its weight are too thick, bulging. The carved goat skulls are a clue. Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library, leading off the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, is the anteroom of death." I think this description gives a very atmospheric insight into this space and how it could have influenced Rothko.
Rothko also visited the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, with its wall paintings of red and black, and told Fischer he had a "deep affinity" between the murals and the colours in the Villa "the same feeling, the same broad expanse of sombre colours".
Rothko's method of painting these canvases was to apply a thin layer of pigmented binder (frequently a rabbit-skin size made by his assistants) directly onto bare canvas, and then to paint thinned oils over the top to create a mix of overlapping colours. Rothko said his paintings' "surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say".
Mary Bustin ACR (a senior paintings conservator at the Tate) has a podcast on the Tate website http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/learnonline/modernpaints/rothko.htm which clearly explains the way that Rothko and his assistants worked on these paintings, beginning with the rabbit-skin, pigmented glue to get a primed, red canvas and then the application of the further layers of paint.
She goes on to say:
"Rothko used a fairly traditional basis for his paintings. He used tube oil paints, artists' oil paints, that he would squish out into tins … and then add a bit of turpentine so that it would be silky and softer. And you can see in this black painting in the middle of the wall on the left - with almost like a window form with two openings in it. If you look at the black paint, and look carefully, you can see Rothko's used a fairly thin paint and a large brush and he's scuffed it on; he's scuffed it from side to side; flicked it a little bit so you can just see feathered edges. The lines that he's making are not strong and heavily defined, they're sort of soft and he's playing with the forms. It looks as if the black is blurring into the maroon on either side. But it looks more simple than it really is because he hasn't used just one black: he's waited until this black is dry and then he's gone over the top of it with a bluer black and then a browner black. And the maroon too is not a simple maroon: he's added a bit more, he's stabbed it a little bit with the ends of the brush. So you can see in the top right corner there's a bluer maroon and a redder maroon.
And he's working quite fast too. If you look at the window-openings you can see black splashes, places where the paint has sort of flicked onto the surface. And he doesn't seem to mind about that, likes the fact that there's a little bit of accident in there.
Rothko rather played with his paint and if you look around the room you can see ways in which he adapted his oil paint by adding extra things, or by diluting it so much that say if you look at the painting on the right - the one with the red window and the white haze behind. The white haze has arrived because he diluted his paint so much that it in fact became pale as it dried. That pale area there is in fact a very dark grey paint it's just scattering the light so much that it looks like haze. That's part of the fun of these paintings - the longer you look at them the more that things appear."
It is difficult to tell, just by looking online, how the canvasses appear “in the flesh”. No matter how good the photograph, you can’t see the detail, or which layer is on top of which, or the surface texture of a painting. It is especially difficult to see the different layers in the black, as described above, so when I was looking at these paintings, I concentrated more on the lighter coloured paintings. The three that stood out for me personally were the ones with brighter colours in, even if the bright colour was a very small part of the painting.
In “Red on Maroon, Mural, Section 2” (1959) and “Red on Maroon, Mural, Section 5” (1959) the paintings are landscape format with (more or less) the same maroon background with a rough, rectangular form in the centre. In both these paintings, there is a very light, bright red rectangle which has been painted over with darker tones. In “Section 2” this is a maroon very similar to the background, and in “Section 5” it is a much darker, blacky-red over the bright red. For me, in both paintings, this thin, bright line edging the rectangles really stands out and, taken in context with the research above, almost seems like a light trying to break through the darkness of the rest of the canvas.
In “Untitled” 1958, the maroon background is overpainted with bright red leaving two maroon “columns” in the centre of the almost square painting. It is clear that the light red is overpainted, as the maroon shows through in areas, and brush/texture marks can quite clearly be seen. The light red paint is more solid along the inside edges of the form, as if he has applied the paint and then feathered it back away from this edge – again, I feel this thicker paint is meant to define the edges between the two colours.
I contrasted this with one of the darker paintings “Black on Maroon” 1958. The forms painted on both the canvasses are very similar in shape, but it appears that the black has been overpainted with dark red and then feathered into the lighter red of the background, which itself is very loosely painted and appears quite textured. This makes the shapes blend much more into the background, and it is not clear (unlike the brighter painting) which layer is actually on top of the picture plane.
