Mark Rothko: Art of Darkness

Mark Rothko is the great thundercloud of 20th century American painting, a man who struggled to find a way for mere pigment to summon immense reservoirs of feeling, and who took his own life when the struggle proved too much. This is why one of the most baffling episodes in Rothko's story has to do with the Seagram murals, a suite of vast, brooding canvases he produced for Manhattan's sparkling Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko was an artist who could say, and mean it: "The sense of the tragic is always with me when I paint." And the Four Seasons is the kind of place that serves petit fours with the coffee.

Fifteen of the Seagram murals, exhibited together for the first time in one gallery, are the centerpiece of "Rothko," a quietly devastating show of his late work running at London's Tate Modern. By the time he made them, Rothko was at the height of his powers as an artist. He was also a favorite among rich collectors, which didn't sit well with him. Were the moneymen buying his beckoning fogbanks of color simply because they found them decorative? Possibly; that may be one reason why, in 1957, his palette darkened. Nothing about a glowering picture like Four Darks in Red, completed in 1958, suggests it was painted to go with the curtains.

Given that history, it is all the more puzzling that just a few months later, Rothko would agree to provide work for a restaurant in the newly completed Seagram Building. The commission came by way of Philip Johnson, the American architect and peerless cultural middleman, who had collaborated on the design of the Four Seasons and had also arranged for New York's Museum of Modern Art to buy its first Rothko. So it may have been partly out of gratitude that Rothko agreed to a project that was in every way wrong for him. The Four Seasons was glittering, elegant and worldly. Rothko, then 54, was intense, anguished and obsessed with producing images for an era in which, as he saw it, God was an exhausted convention but the need for transcendence was not. Did he really believe that his pulsing canvases could insinuate their note of basso profundo between the oyster starter and the soufflé?

Maybe not. He once snarled: "I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room." But in the end it was Rothko whose endurance gave out. By then, he had completed more than 30 canvases: dark, foreboding panels in which his characteristic horizontal bars of color were replaced by explosive verticals or squares that seem like gateways to something ineffable. Unwilling finally to imagine this work on the walls of a society hangout, Rothko withdrew from the project in 1960.

But he moved on to make other works in series, notably the black on black canvases from 1964. In each of them, a black square rides on a background only very slightly less black. Rothko wasn't fiddling with an art-historical endgame here, trying to see how flat and stark he could make his pictures. The Black-Form paintings, as they are known, are emblems for existence itself, statements at a near-molecular level of detail about the minimal order necessary to distinguish life from the disorder of death. Indeed, look at them long enough and they make you think of a doorway into extinction. Do they prefigure Rothko's suicide in 1970? We don't know. What we do know is that eventually Rothko stood at that same doorway. And having thought about it for a long time, he stepped through.