There's an adequate summary of Mark Rothko's life and career in the full episode list, so I'll skip it. Most of this material was news to me. Not much of an aesthete, I'd never been able to keep Mark Rothko the painter straight from his contemporary, Theodore Roethke, the poet. See? That's the advantage of a liberal arts education. You learn a great deal about nothing.
This episode is different in several ways from all the others. It wouldn't be off the mark to call it unique. For one thing, an actor plays Simon Schama, our host, in 1970's London, discovering Roethke by accident after taking a wrong turn in the Tate Gallery. Schama's narration of his youthful education is kind of amusing. Art was supposed to be fun thirty years ago. You know: Andy Warhol's cans of Cambell's Soup and Liechtenstein's comic book figures with speech bubbles above their face, saying things like, "We have to talk"? Schama and his friends sat around discussing art while "getting not exactly high minded." Well, I thought it was pretty funny anyway, having been in a similar place at the time.
Then, too, there is a heavy emphasis on Mark Rothko's family, his personal life, and his attitude towards his work. Oh, we get to see multiple examples of his paintings but they act more as an index to what Rothko was going through, rather than as things in themselves. He wound up producing some large paintings for an establishment in Dallas, all dark blues and blacks, before killing himself.
Before that, during the 1950s, he anticipated really FREE paintings by Klein, Pollack, and the rest. He produced works that imposed one or two big colorful squares on top of another, even bigger, square. Simon Schama sees great depths in these colorful squares and squiggles. The emotion invested in them, I can grasp, but they don't grasp me back. To me, with a bit of moderation, they could work very well as tiles in a modern bathroom.
Curiously, the stuff that I found most interesting was his earlier work from the 20s and 30s, which was stylized but still representational. What I mean is, you could see OBJECTS in the paintings. He did a series depicting scenes from the subway that seemed as haunting as Edward Hopper but without the same degree of allegiance to the visual image. Subways are always spooky anyway, aren't they? A steel and terrazzo ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. You can't go wrong doing a subway.
Still, the man had guts. No denying that. He was offered two and a half million bucks to do some over-sized paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building in New York. He didn't do it. The splendid actor, Allan Corduner, who portrays Rothko, explains that the artists didn't want rich capitalists dipping into the truffled sole meuniere under his paintings, as if they were supposed to provide a pleasant background for their self indulgence. Me, I might have turned the offer down too, even if I'd been a famous artist, but mostly because I'd be afraid that if too many people -- those outside the bubble -- saw my work they might find it banal, a series of colored squares on other colored squares. Instead of an adoring clique, you've got a horde of gobbling philistines chatting about the price of Polaroid.
This episode is different in several ways from all the others. It wouldn't be off the mark to call it unique. For one thing, an actor plays Simon Schama, our host, in 1970's London, discovering Roethke by accident after taking a wrong turn in the Tate Gallery. Schama's narration of his youthful education is kind of amusing. Art was supposed to be fun thirty years ago. You know: Andy Warhol's cans of Cambell's Soup and Liechtenstein's comic book figures with speech bubbles above their face, saying things like, "We have to talk"? Schama and his friends sat around discussing art while "getting not exactly high minded." Well, I thought it was pretty funny anyway, having been in a similar place at the time.
Then, too, there is a heavy emphasis on Mark Rothko's family, his personal life, and his attitude towards his work. Oh, we get to see multiple examples of his paintings but they act more as an index to what Rothko was going through, rather than as things in themselves. He wound up producing some large paintings for an establishment in Dallas, all dark blues and blacks, before killing himself.
Before that, during the 1950s, he anticipated really FREE paintings by Klein, Pollack, and the rest. He produced works that imposed one or two big colorful squares on top of another, even bigger, square. Simon Schama sees great depths in these colorful squares and squiggles. The emotion invested in them, I can grasp, but they don't grasp me back. To me, with a bit of moderation, they could work very well as tiles in a modern bathroom.
Curiously, the stuff that I found most interesting was his earlier work from the 20s and 30s, which was stylized but still representational. What I mean is, you could see OBJECTS in the paintings. He did a series depicting scenes from the subway that seemed as haunting as Edward Hopper but without the same degree of allegiance to the visual image. Subways are always spooky anyway, aren't they? A steel and terrazzo ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. You can't go wrong doing a subway.
Still, the man had guts. No denying that. He was offered two and a half million bucks to do some over-sized paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building in New York. He didn't do it. The splendid actor, Allan Corduner, who portrays Rothko, explains that the artists didn't want rich capitalists dipping into the truffled sole meuniere under his paintings, as if they were supposed to provide a pleasant background for their self indulgence. Me, I might have turned the offer down too, even if I'd been a famous artist, but mostly because I'd be afraid that if too many people -- those outside the bubble -- saw my work they might find it banal, a series of colored squares on other colored squares. Instead of an adoring clique, you've got a horde of gobbling philistines chatting about the price of Polaroid.
