Author Archives: bob

Washington DC is hot about Mark Rothko these days thanks to the play by John Logan being performed there called “Red.”  My friend who lives there just sent me the whole Arts section from this past weekend’s Washington Post.  I was pleased to see a really good review of the play by Philip Kennicott who shows how little John Logan gets right about either Rothko or the art world.  As he says, Logan borrows his portrait of the painter “from central casting.”

Last summer in Madrid I had a Rothko experience that gave me a good, fascinating start.  I like his work and sometimes don’t like his work and wonder, as everyone does, how it will fare, how long it will last.  Of course the Post’s other articles point out that the Rothko Foundation got the National Gallery of Art to become the central repository of archival study of Rothko.  Pretty much like getting government bonds to stand behind the value of that painting, if you happen to own one.  Or at least a strong position for securing the judgments of history.

But I saw all of that reputation called sharply into question on the day we were spending at the Centro Reina Sofia, Spain’s premier showcase for modern and contemporary art.  The Reina Sofia is the permanent home of Picasso’s “Guernica” and in years past that painting drew large crowds.  Last summer there was hardly anyone there.  In fact the whole museum felt pretty down-at-the-heels or at least empty of excitement.  There was a lot of space devoted to newly released archival material about the Spanish Civil War.  It seemed like the large collection of modern painting, post-WW II painting, had been significantly downsized, lots of it put back into storage no doubt.  All the excitement last summer in Madrid was for a new retrospective at the Thyssien of Juan Antonio Lopez, the current greatest living painter in Spain, now in his early 80s and a sort of hyper realist.  His paintings show landscapes, buildings, people, open refrigerators.  There’s much more to be said than that, but its clear his vision is a long way from Rothko and that era.

As I wandered the galleries in the Centro, I noticed that the curators were trying to include more clips from movies in each gallery.  There would be short clips of significant films from the period of art being presented.  Or clips of film that linked to other pieces in interesting ways in terms of artistic questions or challenges.

I strolled up to one large room, the lighting throughout is sort of dim in the hallways and as I turned the corner into the collection of rooms that made up this gallery I could see on the far wall a large clip from a movie playing on the white wall.  Instantly I recognized Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, a famous scene from Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”  A small explanatory card on the wall.  The museum was taking film much more seriously as art.  Then right to my left a small work that felt instantly familiar but strange.  I looked at it.  It was a little too high on the wall and then I saw the names on the identifying wall card.  Mark Rothko, “Untitled,”  1952.  Sure enough, one of his smaller works.

Wow, I thought. Or Ouch.  What a fantastic curatorial Put Down and critical judgment.   The primary work is the movie.  Rothko’s period piece contribution is to echo the movie in a small painting contemporaneous, yes, and resonant with the theme of Window.  The painting looked very much like the old roller mounted blinds that you could pull down or allow to spring back up.

Were the curators being as mean as I thought?  Or did they just think the collaging of the two as pieces from the 50s was a sprightly art historical joke?

Mean is at issue because as Rothko struggled to make his way, make his paintings, gain more success and become a major abstract expressionist artist in those now storied 40s and 50s in New York, his critics dismissed his work as mere window dressing, as a kind of department store version of what the new explosion of abstract art in New York after the war was really all about.  I think Clifford Still was one who thought that way about Rothko.  Both tremendous egos.  All of them, clashing egos—Pollock, DeKooning, Reindhardt–the whole gang.

This fall in Denver we saw the opening of the Clifford Still Museum.  Still held out, refused to sell many paintings, produced steadily and kept them all rolled up in a barn near Frederick, MD.  Never had the success of Rothko.  Said in his will the paintings had to be shown in a place that would show only his work, Still, and no one else.  This was thought to be a pretty egotistical position, but he won.  Before his museum opened this fall, many younger artists, artists of the generation after Rothko and Still, managed to get their own one-artist museums to guard their work and their reputations.  Rothko died in 1970, at 67.  Still was born one year after Rothko, 1904, died in 1980.  76.  His wife and daughters kept the works until the right city would agree to build the right museum for them.

If I wrote to John Logan, I wonder if he would reply?  Did he consider writing a play about Clifford Still?  Why Rothko?  Why did he use central casting?  The vagaries of cultural history, of cultural wars, elude us all.  Even if he replied, the answer would not be in his letter or his email.  If we could ask Still and Rothko?  They would say, as all painters do, look at the work.