TATE MODERN
This is the seventh in a series of original tracks written about artworks at Tate Modern.
Tate invited The Real Tuesday Weld to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire the writing of a track.
In the end, it was the Rothko room, because 'it somehow has both the melancholy oppressiveness of a tomb and the expansive mystery of a dream'.
You can listen to it in the gallery or here online.
Stephen Coates became [The Real] Tuesday Weld in 1999.
Inspired by dreams of Al Bowlly and the American actress Tuesday Weld and influenced by 1930s jazz, Gainsbourg and Morricone. He has spent the subsequent period crafting recordings that try to capture the way he heard music when he was a child - the strange and haunting sounds of old songs floating from radios in the late afternoon.
The first full-length release When Cupid Meets Psyche (released 2001) was acclaimed as "...warm and welcoming as well as arty... a gypsy knees-up, a psychedelic bossa Latino, the polite reeds of a ‘30s dance band crushed by booming hip-hop bass..." (Q Magazine)
As a performing act, the band has recently performed their soundtrack to the 1948 surrealist classic 'Dreams That Money Can Buy' - most notably in the Turbine Hall as part of the Tate's Long Weekend in summer 2006. A new album will be released in 2007 along with further collaborations with other artists and filmmakers and remixes for Bebel Gilberto, Shrift and David Byrne / Fosco in the Dark.
Mark Rothko saw these paintings as objects of contemplation, demanding the viewer's complete absorption. They were originally commissioned for a restaurant, but Rothko soon realised that their brooding character required a very different environment.
Rothko was influenced by Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, with its blind windows and deliberately oppressive atmosphere. Rothko commented that Michelangelo 'achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.'
Recognising that the worldly setting of a restaurant would not be the ideal location for such a work, Rothko withdrew from the commission. He finally presented the series to the Tate Gallery, expressing his deep affection for England and for British artists, especially JMW Turner. All nine paintings are included in this display. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.
(Text by Christopher Grunenberg)
Mark Rothko was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. His mature paintings, composed of luminous, soft-edged rectangles that appear to hover or float above the canvas, are among the most enduring and mysterious created by an artist in modern times.
It took Rothko three decades to arrive at the paintings that would bring him world renown. With only a minimum of formal art education, he moved in stages from expressionistic representational paintings in the 1920s and 1930s, to canvasses based on classical mythology in the early 40s, followed by a period of Surreal abstractions, and finally arriving at pure abstraction by the end of the decade.
You can read about Mark Rothko in the Tate Collection.
