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Written on November 13th, 2008 by Steve and filed in Steve
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Years ago, too many to think of it pains me to say, I went to the Tate Gallery to look at Ben Nicholson’s work. I wanted to study the paintings and reliefs with the fresh eyes of an art student rather than a schoolboy. I’d always liked them but had struggled to see the point, so I hoped that my new found critical eye and arty pretensions might guide me through.
Unfortunately I never made it to the gallery showcasing his work and Ben Nicholson’s loss became Mark Rothko’s gain as I wandered into and then got captivated by the Rothko Room or Seagram Gallery. Of course I’d seen the massive blocks of burgundy, black and grey before but had always been on my way to something more, well, pictorial. I’d not seen the point before. This time though I stopped and actually looked into the paintings. I looked so hard that I genuinely got lost in them. I sat down and stared. I wasn’t looking at the content or subject, I wasn’t learning from the structure, brushstrokes and colour and I wasn’t trying to think of the work in the context of art movement or history. In reality, the paintings made me stop and think about… nothing.
I thought about nothing for so long that I ended up having to run down a platform at St Pancras to get my train home – very uncool for an art student, but from then on I spent a considerable amount of time in the Rothko Room. I studied the work, I met friends there, I took bored girlfriends and later my children there, I went there during my bleakest moments to seek solace and I went there before important client presentations just to clear my head. It became a second home. I knew all the work, got used to the muted lighting, the colour of the walls and the relative comfort of the backless benches. I watched people, had some very interesting chats – not all about art.
And then they moved it.
Now, I’m not anti the Tate Modern in Southwark. The building, gallery spaces etc. are all monumental. The exhibitions have, in the main, been absorbing. I’d prefer to pay less for a sandwich and crisps but hey, the rest of it is free. Apart from the massive shop, where I could happily bankrupt myself. And, of course, I think that the Tate brand is fantastic.
The trouble has been the new Rothko Room. I went there when Tate Modern opened, full of expectation and hoping for a new and improved experience but it’s just not had the same atmosphere, the same buzz, the same provision of well-being. The paintings are the same, the space is almost the same but the wall colour and lighting are more somber and throw the work out less.
Over the years, after much grumbling, I’ve got used to it but last weekend I went to see the Rothko Exhibition where, for the first time I would see the Seagram paintings in amongst other later works. I went full of enthusiasm for the spread of work but not expecting too much from the presentation of it. How wrong I was. It was simply stunning with 4 galleries devoted to different phases of the great mans career, fully supported by exhibitions of sketches, notes, light boxes etc that allowed us to see the way paint had been applied in layers – in other words, a real opportunity to study his work in a new way. The best bit for me was a display of small guache on paper colour roughs created as preliminary experiments for the Seagram paintings. This allowed me to see how Rothko painstakingly arrived at the solutions for the work that I’ve loved for years.
The main thing for me from the visit has been that I now appreciate the Seagram Gallery in Tate Modern as much as when it was in the old Tate, just in a different way. I quite obviously got too comfortable with the way things were.
Is there a point to this blog? I hope so. Get down to Tate Modern before the Rothko show ends. If you see a guy gazing into space with a stupid grin on his face, it’s probably me.
I should have known better, but I’ve learnt that there is no room for being comfortable with things as they are in the world of art. The same applies to creative, design, marketing and brand. Always move forward otherwise you get caught out when the world changes.
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