Rothko Fans Must-See: Rothko Symposium at Tate Modern

I'm on the email list for Tate Modern's Events and Courses calendar, for curiosity's sake, which is pretty much a tease as I live in the north east of England and The Tate Modern is in London, about three hours on the train. Trains in the UK are very expensive, it's cheaper to fly (how's that helping offset our carbon footprint?) and then you'd have to get a hotel for the night before. Cost of one night in London would be about $500 including travel - and that's if done on the cheap.

However, this time there was an event that would make the trip and all of its sacrifices worthwhile. Rothko The Symposium is happening Saturday, September 27th, 2008 from 10:30 am to 5:30 pm:

This symposium brings together a stellar cast of international speakers to explore Mark Rothko's late work in the context of the 1960s, a time of historic turmoil when the practice of painting was under increasing attack. The speakers explore key issues such as series and seriality, and the existentialist endeavour of Rothko's late paintings against the rise of Pop art, minimalism and Conceptual art, offering new ways of thinking about one of the most significant artists of the last century.

If you 'get' Rothko, you are thinking this sounds so cool and you are really wanting to go. If you don't know who he is or you don't get Rothko, then you would likely rather eat a piece of gum off the street. I fall into the first category (obviously) and feel such an intense affinity for Rothko's later work that to describe it here would embarrass me, my family and the guy who delivers our groceries.

If you know what I mean, and haven't visited Tate Modern before, make a point of it if you find yourself in London. They boast a Rothko room that is home to nine of the murals he was commissioned to paint for the most exclusive room of the new restaurant at The Four Seasons in New York's Seagram Building. Rothko gave them to Tate Modern after returning his fee and refusing to hand them over to the luxury hotel chain, at odds with the lifestyle of excess that the once poor, Russian immigrant had come to despise.  

But it's not quite what you'd expect. From the fascinating 2002 Guardian article Feeding Fury: How Rothko's Seagram murals found their way to London:

This is what Rothko told John Fischer, a fellow tourist he bumped into in the bar of an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic in the early summer of 1959 after he had been working for several months on the paintings. Fischer was an editor of Harper's Magazine and their conversations over drinks have therefore been recorded - Fischer published Portrait Of The Artist As An Angry Man, a memoir of Rothko, in Harper's Magazine in July 1970. Some guardians of Rothko's memory prefer to think that he was playing up to the journalist, that he didn't mean what he said, because what he said is so incendiary. Rothko told Fischer he wanted to upset, offend and torture the diners at the Four Seasons, that his motivation was entirely subversive.

Fischer quotes Rothko describing the room in that very expensive restaurant in the Seagram Building as "a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off".

Rothko didn't seem to Fischer in the least unworldly, let alone spiritual about his intentions. "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," he gloated, with paintings that will make those rich bastards "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up".

I've sat in that room on four occasions and found that despite his attempts to disturb the viewer (which he does succeed in doing), Rothko couldn't betray what seems to be an unstoppable propensity to create a beautiful experience (described by many as 'religious' or 'spiritual'). The shapes within, like those in the rest of his late pictures (as he liked to call them) do also float above the canvas. It's a profoundly confusing ordeal, and I highly recommend it.