Led by artist and writer Simon Morley

Mondays 27 October 2008 – 1 December 2008, 18.45–20.15

The open-ended nature of Rothko's work presents inherent ambiguities that offer a multitude of interpretations, none of which can claim absolute validity. In this six-week course, each session will explore a different way of engaging with Rothko's work. We'll examine how to approach art with multiple and often conflicting interpretations, including formal, existential, spiritual, post-modern, experiential or synaesthetic approaches.

1.   FORMAL

The formal approach promoted during Rothko's lifetime by the critic Clement Greenberg, interpreted the artist's reductive style as a self-conscious analysis of the medium. In this light, Rothko's avoidance of figurative subject-matter and narrative content was motivated by a conviction that representation belonged to the world of literature and not the plastic arts. Rothko sought the 'essence' of painting, by stripping away all that hides what it alone is, thereby securing objective grounds for its aesthetic and cultural value.

2.   EXISTENTIAL

This approach was promoted during the artist's own life by, for example, the critic Harold Rosenberg. Rothko's characteristic style was described as arising from a desire to express in stark terms the reality of modern man, of  the self stripped bare of all forms of consolation. According to this interpretation, Rothko's art is truly 'tragic' because it is about the essentially nihilistic reality of the modern condition. It plumbs the depths of despair, and is essentially an art of deliberate negation which aims to blunt our sight, to strip art of its authority over the real, to be at its extreme point, an exercise in 'blocked vision'.

3.   ART HISTORICAL

Art historian Anna Chave placed Rothko's practice within a lineage of European and American art. This approach interprets the paintings in relation to the inherited subjects and styles. Rothko's seemingly abstract works can even be considered to carry residual traces of traditional subject-matter drawn from pagan, Jewish and Christian sources.

4. SPIRITUAL

This can also be called the 'theo-aesthetic' approach. Robert Rosenblum, saw Rothko and other artists of his generation in a broader historical context of Romanticism's quest to find a spiritual art in the modern age. Rothko, in this light, can also be seen as committed to cultural imperatives arising from his Jewish cultural background, and also from traditions of Platonism and Christian theology.  He especially felt the potency of the commandment against idolatry that is central to Judaism. In this reading, the absence of the kind of imagery we might expect to see in a painting can be understood as motivated by the artist's belief in the seductive power of the image, and his belief in the superior reality of a transcendent absolute.

5.   POSTMODERN

This approach, coming to the fore since the 1980s and espoused by Serge Guilbaut, re-interpreted Rothko in relation to what is seen as the failings of the modernist 'project'. Thus, art historians analysed how the artists of Rothko's generation were, despite their avowedly revolutionary goals serve Cold War ideology.

6.   SYNAESTHESIA

This approach drew on research how the different senses overlap, for example how sound can effect vision. In this context, Rothko is analyzed in relation to the complexity of the bodily experience of the work, and in relation to other media, such as music.

Tate Modern  Seminar Room
£90 (£60 concessions), booking required
Price includes drinks afterwards

  

This event is related to the Rothko exhibition