Paint it red
As one year of cultural curtailment bleeds into another we cast our thoughts back to the way things were in more vibrant times, prior to a regime of interminable mask wearing, home workouts, and crossing the road to avoid each other.
One such time, back in June 2018, found johnandjane at the Wyndhams theatre in London to see ‘Red’, the story of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Commission. Set against a backdrop of vibrant cultural churn in late 50s New York, this was a fertile time for the arts, in a city which initially rallied after the decimation wrought on urban centres in Europe following the 2nd world war, the city’s renaissance was somewhat shortlived, with a declining population brought about by suburbanisation as people sought a more bucolic version of the American dream away from this bruised metropolis. And so it is at this point in 1958 that we find Rothko, with the likes of Warhol at his heels, feeling resentful, rudderless, and dismayed at the pace of change around him, while battling his demons over whether to honour a commission to create a series of works for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagrams building on Park Avenue, a commission for which Rothko was advanced a considerable sum by the Bronfman family who wanted 500-600 square feet of mural scale canvases for their money.
The reluctant witness to his tortured musings is a young assistant, Ken, brilliantly played by Alfred Enoch, whose role it is to indulge, placate, and occasionally admonish Rothko, just enough to keep both his job and his self respect while faced with an onslaught of bile and bitterness frequently directed straight at him as the only conduit Rothko has to the outside world. Alfred Molina did an incredible job of bringing Rothko to the stage, an erratic, glowering presence, splashing crimson furiously onto canvas while meditating on death and irrelevance, unable to comprehend why anyone would be interested in the rubbish being produced in the name of ‘art’ by talentless newcomers such as Warhol, willingly indulging in his own delusions, radiating indignation from within an echo chamber barely able to contain his own ego.
The rest is well documented history. Rothko decided that his works were too important to be a dormant backdrop to fat cat bankers wining and dining their mistresses so he refunded the money and retained the works, all of which were sold over time to private collectors. The first, and only time they were ever reunited in a single place was, we believe at the Tate Modern back in 2008, a full decade prior to this production of Red being presented in the same city. Having attended that exhibition in 2008 this theatre production felt like an illuminating book-end, a violently compelling companion piece to that story. One can only imagine how impactful it would have been had they been able to stage this production in an adjoining room at the Tate Modern alongside the Seagram commission in the same building.
The stance taken by Rothko echoes a sentiment we recently saw expressed in the art documentary ‘The Price of Everything’ in which a pretentious NYC art dealer smugly revelled in the notion that “you never want to be lobby art” while discussing a number of recent Jeff Koons pieces which had been acquired by corporations for display in the lobbies of their headquarters. Perhaps this was the very conceit that Rothko was trying to avoid, he didn’t want his Seagram murals to be denegrated to the humiliating role of mere ‘lobby art’. That said it is doubtful Jeff Koons has suffered too many sleepless nights at having befallen the same fate, in fact it could be argued that every artist aspires to reach the level of fame/notoriety which could see them pass into the hallowed stratosphere of the lobby art club..
