066 ROTHKO
Right
Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960. Oil on canvas.
290.83 cm x 268.29 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Helen Crocker Russell Fund purchase © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023
Opposite spread, right to left Mark Rothko Untitled, 1969–1970 Untitled, 1969 Untitled, 1969 Untitled, 1969 Untitled, 1969 Sculptures: Alberto Giacometti L’Homme qui marche I, 1960 Grande Femme III, 1960
Vue d’installation de l’exposition Mark Rothko, galerie 10, niveau 2, salle Black and Gray, Giacometti, exposition présentée du 18 octobre 2023 au 2 avril 2024 à la Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko - Adagp, Paris, 2023
‘Rothko suffered decades of disappointment and neglect, and endured painful personal losses and crushing
poverty before he finally achieved recognition’
THESE PAINTINGS are worth a fortune and they are fragile. Museums do not lend them out. Somehow, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has assembled 115 works, as many as the National Gallery of Art in Washington managed 25 years ago, but in Paris the show includes pictures from a much wider range of collections, both public and private. Te Tate has even lent the Seagram Murals, the brooding burgundy canvases originally destined for the Four Seasons restaurant inside Mies van der Rohe’s skyscraper on Park Avenue. Tere is the Subway Series from the 1930s; the attempts at ‘a new frontier for painting’ from the 1940s that are fruity, mannered, over-elaborate, anthropomorphic mythological visions, produced as a reaction to the arrival in New York after the Second World War of so many Parisian surrealists. And then, at last, the pictorial language grows increasingly recognisable and abstract as the relationships between the figures and their background became less and less pronounced. Te pivotal year was 1949 that definitively marked the shift to his ‘classic’ style from which Te Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection of 1960 is recreated in Paris – the first and only installation established during the artist’s lifetime. Te prize exhibit in the
exhibition is from 1960, the three metre high No. 14 that has come from San Francisco, radiating orange over ultramarine blue. Instantly familiar and unexpectedly complex at the same time, these enigmatic images frequently summon forth excessive commentary, ‘out come the violins’ wrote Robert Hughes about the glut of turgid poetic analysis that accompanied Rothko’s work in the 1950s and 60s. When it comes to violins, however, Rothko himself had always been fond of Paul Valéry’s remark that to walk into a museum was like listening to ten orchestras all playing at the same time. He was never happy participating in group shows, and longed to see his paintings inhabit a space in which no other artists were present.
So he would be happy in Paris this year. His donation of the Seagram murals to the Tate was an attempt to realise that ambition. Total immersion was always Rothko’s intention. ‘Tey are not pictures,’ he said of the murals. ‘I have made a place.’ It is one of the enduring myths of 20th century art, the solitary figure of the misunderstood artist defending the gravitas of his project. To the same end, in 1964, he accepted John and Dominique de Menil’s commission to be the sole artist represented on the walls of a college chapel in Houston –
by contrast, a story with a happy ending. Te life of Mark Rothko was filled with unhappiness and ended in tragedy. He died a miserable death over 50 years ago, a death so dramatic that it marked the end of abstract expressionism, and set off a most remarkable case for malpractice and conspiracy to defraud brought by the artist’s estate that gripped the New York art world over a period of four years in the 1970s, frequently being compared to Watergate in its complexity. Te orphans eventually won, the value of the work doubled in price, and then doubled again, and again. Every painting was now considered to be a blue-chip masterpiece. A colour field painting last sold for $87m in 2012. In art, a fair price is what you think you can get, the market being well aware that a corpse does not paint. Te best sort of artist as far as the galleries and the auction houses are concerned, is a good, dead artist. Rothko suffered decades of disappointment and neglect, and endured painful personal losses and crushing poverty before he finally achieved recognition and became the tragic victim of the system he little understood and came to despise. And once he died, everything he produced, all that sensuously nuanced colour was widely assumed to be where one could discover
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