Prints in Concrete (2)- Rothko: Black on Maroon/Red on Maroon

Prints in Concrete- Rothko: Black on Maroon/Red on Maroon series

Looking at works of art and the profound effects it had on me. The analysis will not be geared intensely towards the works themselves, but why I feel I had such a deep response to it.

Mark Rothko Painting Exhibit -Black on Maroon/Red on Maroon series

Date experienced: October 2005

Location: Tate Modern, UK

Rothko’s Black on Maroon/Red on Maroon series.

Description of series:

Mark Rothko saw these paintings as objects of contemplation, demanding the viewer’s complete absorption. They were originally commissioned for a restaurant, but Rothko soon realised that their brooding character required a very different environment.

In the late 1950s, Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the fashionable Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York. He set to work, having constructed a scaffold in his studio to match the exact dimensions of the restaurant. However, the murals were darker in mood than his previous work. The bright and intense colours of his earlier paintings shifted to maroon, dark red and black.

Rothko was influenced by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, with its blind windows and deliberately oppressive atmosphere. Rothko commented that Michelangelo ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.’

Recognising that the worldly setting of a restaurant would not be the ideal location for such a work, Rothko withdrew from the commission. He finally presented the series to the Tate Gallery, expressing his deep affection for England and for British artists, especially JMW Turner. All nine paintings are included in this display. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.

Click here for complete images and information on this room’s exhibit.

Familiar with Rothko’s work on a surface level, what this exhibit taught me is how seeing an image in a book of art, or an online photograph, becomes borderline pointless once one has experienced the works themselves in person. Images are included here just as reference.. but the subtlety is only properly communicated in the presence of the authentic paintings. No photograph or book print can truly capture shades and texture.

The immediate size of the works, is what is still a large room despite the museum deeming it compact, drew me in. The slightly reduced lighting scheme of the room took a few minutes to adjust to, and slowly bring out the color shifts in the paintings.

This was another exhibit I probably spent an hour in. Looking for the best distance to view these works, I noted my immediate attraction to red which has been a constant since childhood. And yet it isn’t a color that fills my life. I never wear it, my living space barely has any in it. And yet when I encounter it I’m drawn in. Often in modern stylized films I find people have used red the same way..it only shows up to make a specific point and is never placed throughout a film. The Sixth Sense being the most obvious example that comes to immediate mind.

Slowly letting your eye match the light level, and letting your mind adjust and drift upon the multitude of color shifts, from one to another or from a darker to a lighter shade of red (or the dominant color I was witnessing)…brought a certain kind of focused peace. AFTER a feeling of being subtly trapped, as remarked above. Though it is possible that I walked in expecting to feel that having read the description above, which is printed on the wall as you enter the space.

I remarked in my previous ‘Prints in Concrete’ post of the melancholy feeling Dictio Pii's music contained of days and seasons rolling by, slowly and yet quickly.. Here I felt as if I was watching the graduation of a sunset's color change, but simply accepting and understanding this is something that is meant to happen and things will work out in my favor. The colors only slightly resemble the natural event…but that was the eventual image and feeling I’d settled on from contemplating what was in front of me. Thinking deeply, but completely at peace.

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The rolling changes of color and density in a storm cloud was another image that came to mind. It felt as if passing through a storm cloud would bring you to this relaxed state; much like the often vivid sunsets appearing after a violent storm clears the sky. I was locked in by a door which was illusory, and composed of the same thickness as a cloud. All I had to do was think/walk through it, and rest on the other side. Often this room’s color palette is described as brooding.. was I not seeing it, or was I SO used to being in a brooding state at the time that this was what produced the ‘comfort?’ That is something I still contemplate. Regardless, I file the experience under positives.

While most rooms in a museum are naturally silent and reverential, I did note that this may have been the quietest room I had been in all day. It’s also possible that the noise levels were the same as any other room; but the level of contemplation I was at had turned the world’s volume down.

-Adam Barnick