Today we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a beautiful winter day, cold with a clear blue sky. We took the 59 bus to Waterloo Bridge and walked along the South Bank, which was busy with other Londoners enjoying the rare afternoon sunshine. Riverside London looked absolutely beautiful and we stopped and admired St Paul’s before passing into the cavernous interior of the Turbine Hall. We paused briefly at the current Unilever Series installation, which neither of us thought was up to much, though perhaps you only ‘get it’ if you spend more time there. It all seemed rather unimaginative, a collation of pastiches, which perhaps was what it was all about, in a postmodern kind of way.
The main perk of working in a museum – or, at least, the one I work in – is that I can get into most exhibitions for free, so there really is no excuse for not going to see everything that comes on in London – though there is usually quite a lot going on in London, which is one of the things that is so brilliant about living here, but trying to see everything would be practically a full-time job. Anyway, I love Rothko. One of the things I used to enjoy most about being a teenager in London (and I am one of those rare Londoners who was actually born and raised here) was sitting in the Rothko room when it used to be in the Tate at Millbank, before that was Tate Britain, or there were any other Tates, and it was just ‘The Tate’. This was probably my favourite art gallery when I was younger – everything under one grand and rather beautiful roof, and catering to all the different artistic phases you pass through during adolescence. I had my pre-Raphaelite phase (and am still rather partial to The Brotherhood, I must admit), my Turner phase, but there was always something other-worldly about the enormous Rothko canvases in what I remember as a dimly-lit and rather hallowed space in the old Tate. I have visited them in their new home at Tate Modern, but when I think about those paintings, the image that comes to mind is the old gallery at Millbank.
Anyway hallowed and memorable is not the nature of the space they currently occupy during this exhibition of his late series, which has the Seagram murals at its heart, but perhaps that is the fundamental problem with the transience of temporary exhibitions. The last show we had seen in those rooms was the Juan Múñoz retrospective (his is the Turbine Hall installation I most regret not having seen) and I could still imagine his works occupying those spaces – his works which are so representational and focused on the (his) human form, in almost diametric opposition to Rothko’s paintings, so there was a rather strange layering of the two artists in my mind. In any case, I think the way to experience Rothko’s art is probably to sit calmly and for several hours in the chapel in Houston for which he was commissioned to produce fourteen paintings of his Black Form series. That’s the kind of meditative environment you need to really look at these magnificent paintings, which suggest so many layers of meaning and profundity, opening like windows onto unknowable mysteries, endlessly resisting our natural urge towards interpretation. The hustle and bustle of the Tate on a busy Sunday afternoon was not it (though, of course, great for visitor figures etc etc).
I couldn’t help wondering what Rothko himself would have thought of the exhibition. He withdrew his commission from the Seagram building when he decided that a private restaurant on Park Avenue was “an unsuitable environment in which to experience his paintings”. He worked closely with the Director of the Tate Gallery in the 1960s to agree how some of the murals might be hung in that space, and one interesting piece in the show is the maquette from the Tate Archive showing the agreed arrangement of the hang. This is the gallery I used to love to visit, now lost in the mists of time. Reading the exhibition booklet it became clear that Rothko had very clear ideas about how his paintings should be hung (low), and lit (dimly), in spaces with warm-coloured walls – all features which had been completely ignored in the exhibition design, which had the standardised white walls and overly harsh lighting of modern art galleries, and which had the effect of flattening the tones and gloss of the paintings and made it impossible for you to really see into them in the way I remember being able to. The catalogue reprints his very specific instructions about how some of his murals should be hung for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961 – I assume they were followed then. It seemed to me that if Tate Modern had a reason for disregarding how Rothko wished his own paintings to be experienced (apart from cost), they needed to make a case for it.
I also get a bit frustrated by exhibition text which focuses on the object (usually the case with paintings exhibitions like this one) to total exclusion of all context, refusing to indulge the viewer with biography, or any information about the creative process – we’re there for The Art, you know, which needs to be understood on its own terms. Perhaps I am too used to working in a decorative arts museum, and in a field which always seeks to make connections across societies and technologies. I guess I have developed a prejudice against an attitude which privileges (Western) painting as High Art, without any concern for justifying this place of privilege. If you don’t get it, you’re just not enough of an aesthete.
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It was dark when we left the Tate, but still beautifully clear, and the city lights were reflected in the fast-flowing waters of the Thames – when London is at its most beautiful, I think. We carried on walking along the South Bank, to Southwark Cathedral and past the deserted Borough Market, where we got another bus back to Brixton. At home, I settled down with my green tea and pastel de nata (Portuguese delicacies being one of the joys of living in Lambeth), to read “Here is New York”, the essay on the great city written by E. B. White in 1948. I had bought this little book in the Strand Bookshop during my trip to New York in the autumn, and it was one of the books in the box I shipped back, and only just picked up from the post office depot after getting back to work in early January. I guess it is a love letter to the city by someone who loved to live there, but not at all over-romanticised, a very warts-and-all view, which makes it yet more lovable. It brought back strong memories of my month there in the autumn – which have been rather fading in the onslaught of the more heavily-spiced Damascus memories – as well as drawing many parallels for me with London:
It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings…
New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost everything that comes along … without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.
The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world…
My edition of this essay was printed in 1999 with a foreword by the writer’s stepson. The end of the essay is absolutely remarkable in light of the events of 11 September 2001, which were not even envisioned in 1999, but in 1948, E. B. White wrote:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now…
It certainly is today. How amazing his foresight was from 1948, but I suppose there must always have been a sense of the city being perched so precariously upon the ocean. I always find amazing the view you get of Manhattan from the plane, that utterly flat raft of land with the impossibly tall towers rising from it, somehow not capsizing it.
White talks of the construction of the United Nations headquarters, which was then being built:
The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.
His final paragraph puts me in mind of a scene from my own recent history in New York – a small tree growing out of the top window of an abandoned low-rise building lost in amongst all the skyscrapers and multi-storey apartment buildings of Carnegie Hill, which I passed every day on my walk to the Met, and find now that I did not photograph.
A block or two west of the new City of Man … there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolises the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree’. If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.
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