Research Point: Mark Rothko - The Seagram Murals

These paintings can be viewed on the Tate website by clicking here.

I was aware of Mark Rothko and the seagram murals before this research point came up. However, I had only seen the work in reproduction. In fact, the context in which I had mainly seen Rothko paintings was as in large framed prints which went nicely alongside Ikea furniture so my attitude initially was along the lines of - 'nice colours for interior decor but so what?'

I realised that I may not be getting the full experience in the mass reproduced prints and online photographs so I visted Tate Modern to look at them 'in the flesh'.

The paintings are housed in a relatively small room considering their large size so this contributes to a somewhat claustrophobic feeling. There is no getting away from them or casually drifting past (although there are two doors so it is theoretically possible to just skip through the room) - the dim lighting abd the layout encourage you to sit on the benches provided and stare for a while.  I found this quite meditative. 

The paintings are large in scale - some are in portrait and some in landscape format and they are created in various shades of red, burgundy, maroon and black. The paintings are completely abstract each with a main colour and then a frame-like square or rectangular shape. The shapes are not regular or hard- edged though. If you get up close to the paintings you can see that there are many thin layers of paint applied and they are feathered over each other to create this uneven and irregular/indistinct edge. 

Sitting and looking, I became aware that this created an optical illusion - as my eyes started to lose focus slightly there was an illusion of depth - this I found particularly marked with the red on maroon painting(Click here for image of this painting). It felt as though there was a space behind the red frame through which you could be drawn to a more misty, nebulous background- then the painting came back into focus and once again looked as it was - a flat picture plane. This was quite disconcerting. The feathered edges of overlapping colour had a strange throbbing/vibrating appearance against each other. 

I looked at one of our set textbooks 'This is Modern Art' by Matthew Collings Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1999 for more information on the Seagram paintings. There was some information about Rothko in the chapter 'Nothing Matters' (pg 141-182) but I found the writing style quite flippant and it didn't give me much useful information : 
'His most famous dark paintings are fourteen virtually all-black paintings completed in 1967 as a commission for a chapel in Houston. He did some other really murky maroon ones for a restaurant in 1959 but then changed his mind and they went to the Tate gallery in London instead.' (more about this chapter in the 'reading and reflection' section of this blog)
So I needed to research elsewhere to make sense of the paintings.  

Searching for information about Rothko's painting technique I found this video in the moma multimedia section (The Painting Techniques of Mark Rothko . No 16 (Red, Brown and Black) Abstract Expressionist New York - The Museum of Modern Art. October 3 2010- April 11 2011)
In this video the presenter demonstrates how Rothko mixed his paints with a large amount of turpentine and applied it vigourously to rub it into the surface of the canvas like a stain rather than a surface application. Multiple very thin layers of paint were built up on top of one another often of markedly differing colours - the underneath layers of paint could be read through the surface layers giving a complex result. He would also sometimes take a rag soaked in turps and scrub back into the margins of the shapes he had applied to the canvas in order to break up edges and make them more indistinct. 

I also read  this article in the Guardian by Jonathan Jones 
 www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/dec/07/artsfeatures
The above article/essay was more informative than Matthew Collings and most of the following information has been taken from this. 
The paintings were produced in response to a lucrative commision to provide artwork for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York which was completed in 1958. This was an opulent restaurant in which the city's rich and powerful would dine. The awarding of the comission was a major success for Rothko - particularly given his under-privileged start in life. 
Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz, - a Russian Jew. His family moved to the USA when he was 10 so he may have felt like an outsider and was certainly poor during his childhood. In adulthood he was left wing and he was also reputed to be quite an intense personality who was prone to depression (he eventually committed suicide in 1970). So what might have motivated him to accept a commission to decorate such a symbol of capitalism? He described the Four Seasons restaurant as, 'A place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off'. He is also quoted as saying, 'I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room' - he wanted to feel that they were, 'trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up'

Rothkos's concept for this series of paintings was partly inspired by Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library which is off the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo in Florence. There are apparent windows in the room but they are actually sealed and dark making the atmosphere oppressive or claustrophobic. Click here for an image of the Laurentian Library Vestibule

His other inspiration was the dining room in the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. Click here for an Image from Wikipedia The frescoes in this room are in shades of red and black and depict dionysian (bacchanalean) rituals creating a luxurious but unsettling place to eat. Rothko talked about wanting to 'create a place' rather than just to hang pictures.

Rothko dined once at the Four Seasons restaurant. This may have made him realise that the type of diners he encountered there would not have the commitment to engage with his paintings and he would, therefore not achieve the interaction and effect he intended. His paintings would after all become just expensive pieces of decoration. He withdrew from the commission and never delivered any paintings to the Seagram Building. He agreed to donate some of the paintings to the Tate gallery on condition that he would have his own input into how they were displayed. 

Having experienced the paintings at the Tate I would say that he did achieve his intention of giving the impression of closed off claustrophobic windows that tantalise you that there might be some depth or something beyond and that then show themeselves just to be flat planes. They are, therefore, successful paintings but Rothko's intention to upset and unsettle the super-rich patrons of the restaurant for which the paintings were intended was always somewhat overly ambitious. 

Reference Material Used:

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/rothko/room-guide/room-3-seagram-murals

'This is Modern Art' by Matthew Collings Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1999. 'Nothing Matters' (pg 141-182)

The Painting Techniques of Mark Rothko . No 16 (Red, Brown and Black) Abstract Expressionist New York - The Museum of Modern Art. October 3 2010- April 11 2011)
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/123/689

'Feeding Fury' Jonathan Jones. Guardian Culture Section. Saturday 7th December 2002
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/dec/07/artsfeatures

Images in the public domain from Wikipedia:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Laurentian_Library_vestibule.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Roman_fresco_Villa_dei_Misteri_Pompeii_008.jpg




 

Transparent and Opaque: Monochrome Studies

In this exercise the aim was to build a picture of an object (the suggested subject was a winter tree) in two different ways. First by painting dark positive shapes on a light background and subsequently by painting light coloured negative shapes onto a dark background. 

The suggested subject was ideal as we are in the right season for bare trees so I started by going out for a walk and drawing some rapid sketches in my A6 sketchbook using an ink brush pen and some watercolour.
 

 

I then went on to make some watercolour sketches of trees in our and the neighbour's garden. And also some closer studies in ink and fine liner of sections of branches and the shapes made by the twigs between them - these started to tend more towards abstraction.

 

I made larger versions of these using white gouache to paint negative spaces on black paper and using India ink to make the branch shapes in white paper.

 

I then completed the exercise as directed in the course notes. I used acrylic paints for this exercise. First I pre - drew a tree shape in charcoal over a dry pale grey wash. I then painted the tree shape in an opaque dark grey. I repeated the same image again but this time painting freehand rather than pre-drawing over the pale wash. This produced a slightly more fluid and less angular shapes. I modulated the grey from very dark opaque at the trunk to gradually lighter grey towards the narrower twigs.  

 

After the pale background I turned my attention to the dark ground. I lightly sketched the shape of the tree using a white charcoal pencil and used  a very light toned grey opaque paint to paint in the negative shapes between the branches.  I made a couple of other studies in the same way using washes and opaque mixes of violet.

 

I found that the opaque dark paint easily covered the paler wash when painting the positive shapes of the trees giving a crisp and distinct image. The light coloured opaque paint despite being fairly thick consistency didn't cover the dark background so easily . The result was some irregularity in tone in the negative shapes painted. However - this method really did draw attention to the negative shapes - it reminded me a bit of making a stained glass window with the leading in between left unpainted. This technique could be used for example to emphasise that a silhouetted tree is backlit against a light sky. Although the coverage was quite uneven, I found the result quite aesthetically pleasing and to me the paintings made by painting the negative spaces seemed more lively than those made by painting  the dark shapes of the trunk and branches.

Transparent and Opaque: Tonally Graded Wash/Overlaying Washes/Opaque Colour Mixing

Exercises: Tonally graded wash and Overlaying washes.

I tried this exercise both with acrylic and with oil paint and made notes in my sketchbook about the handling of each.

I started off using the acrylic paint and my first few attempts were really very poor. Partly because of the rapid drying of the paint, I ended up with a page of stripes rather than a subtle tonal gradation. The other problem I encountered was that mixing too much water with the paint caused it to completely lose its structure so I ended up with water with a few granules of pigment which seemed to deposit themselves unevenly on the paper. I used violet and french ultramarine. The ultramarine seemed particularly grainy.

I kept trying and eventually ended with some passable graded washes:

The layered washes on the left side of the above photograph were created by layering a wet wash over a dry one. The right side washes were layered wet into wet. The wet into dry layering was more controllable. Working wet into wet gave less control but made some interesting marks which could be exploited in paintings.

I then made a number of layered washes both wet into wet and wet into dry with a few of my paints to experiment with colour mixing. Again, working wet into wet created some interesting marks which might be considered faults in the paint application but I quite like them. The wet into wet layered washes of cerulean with yellow ochre were particularly reminiscent of landscape (beachscape in particular)  I also layered washes of colour over a dry wash of cadmium yellow hue and over a dry wash of red to create various mixes.

 

 Exercise: Opaque Colour Mixing

The object of this exercise was to try to recreate the colours and tones of some of the transparent graded washes but in opaque paint by using white paint to create the lighter tomes rather than the white of the paper showing through the paint. I chose a single colour graded wash of ultramarine, on overlaid wash of cerulean with yellow ochre and a graded wash of ultramarine and violet to attempt to reproduce. The washes had been created with oil paint diluted with turps - I had tried to create the cerulean wash with the paper upright on a easel and this meant that the paint had run down causing drips on the wash - I learnt from this that it is best to apply the washes with the paper flat on a table.

I mixed the opaque colours which I though corresponded pretty well to the tonal values which I had made with the original washes. I was quite happy initially with the results until I photographed the washes side by side in black and white. It then became clear that I wasn't quite as good at identifying the tonal values as I had thought. 

Unfortunately, during this exercise I also found out that I was quite sensitive to turps fumes. Despite having the window wide open I had a splitting headache and was nauseous by the time I finished. I really do prefer the oil paints to the acrylics, however so will search for a suitable alternative to turps - I'll have to use acrylic paint in the meantime

Basic Paint Application: Painting with Pastels

Exercise: Painting with pastels

I spent quite a lot of time working with pastels in Drawing 1. Here are a few of examples of my previous work:

Soft Pastels:

Soft pastels on a sandpaper ground

Soft pastels have been crushed and applied with a
paintbrush to ad a hint of colour to a pen and ink drawing

Soft pastels on a dark ground (Ingres paper)

Oil Pastels:

Oil pastels on a dark green ground

Oil pastels and oil bars on a pale grey ground

There were a couple of other ways of using the pastels that I had not yet tried apart from in small sections in my sketchbook (for example combining pastels with paint and using oil pastels with solvent) so I decided to make a couple more drawings.

Oil pastel on prepared acrylic paper

We have had a large crop of pomegranates in the garden this year so I decided that these would make a suitable subject for my first sketch. This is a very rough sketch simply as a vehicle for using some different techniques without trying to be accurate with the drawing. I scraped off bits of the oil pastels and oil bars with a palette knife and smeared and script it  about on the paper . I also used some turps on a brush to spread the colour about.

Soft pastel and gouache on black paper

The very rapid sketch above used blended and smeared soft pastel in combination with gouache. It is abstract but was inspired by a view of Naples from an aeroplane when coming in to land.