The exhibition comprises some 50 pictures – on paper and canvas – from the last 12 years of his life. It is based on a suite of 15 murals (out of 30) he painted to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in Manhattan. The paintings, of which the Tate owns nine, were commissioned in 1958 but never put in place because Rothko felt the ostentation of the restaurant to be antipathetical. His choice was to paint “something that will ruin the appetite of every sonofabitch who ever eats in that room” or to hand the fee back: he chose the latter.
The decision was not untypical of him: despite the seemingly spontaneous appearance of his painting, he was particular in his aims, even insisting that the viewer should stand exactly 46 centimetres from the canvases. But then Rothko knew what he wanted his paintings to do. He used the colours of his “multiforms” – the late ones are predominantly maroon, dark red, black, brown and grey – to purge his pictures of subject and meaning. For him they were not about colour relationships but “unknown adventures in an unknown space” and he meant them to demonstrate his insistence on “the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it”.
Rothko claimed that painting was a religious experience and that when people wept in front of his pictures they were experiencing the same religious impulse that he did. In their spirituality, or at least in their revelation of primal emotions, they perfectly complement Bacon’s. Here then are two views of the human condition from which viewers can select according to the state of their own.
