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Mark Rothko at Tate Modern

From:     art reviews
Category: Art
Date:     28 September 2008
Time:     04:21 AM

Review:

Much more popular than Twombly (though it was the first weekend) perhaps because he killed 
himself a while ago and the other guy is still around. You can why he was depressed, all those gray 
brown boxes, once you have reduced painting to a two colours flatness, a landscape really, albeit 
beautiful, where do you go? To heaven, or hell.

I was looking forward to the big R  but couldn't engage, maybe it was the crowds squinting into the 
darkness of his black paintings (shiny versus matt black) but it felt too much like MODERN ART, and I 
didnt slip into the sublime, more the ridiculous. They just bored me a bit. I like them better now, 
thinking about them, their monolithic modernity with the conviction of the pre-postmodernists, and that 
reckless faith in paint and canvas, which is a pinnacle (with Pollock, Newman, and a couple others) of 
what painting can be.


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