0:00:02 > 0:00:06Just how powerful is art? Can it feel like love or grief?
0:00:06 > 0:00:08Can it change your life?
0:00:08 > 0:00:11Can it change the world?
0:00:53 > 0:01:00On February 25th 1970, nine paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko
0:01:00 > 0:01:03arrived at London's Tate Gallery.
0:01:09 > 0:01:12A few hours earlier on the same day,
0:01:12 > 0:01:14Rothko's body was discovered
0:01:14 > 0:01:18lying on the bathroom floor of his midtown studio.
0:01:18 > 0:01:23The painter, who had spent so much time in his own mind,
0:01:23 > 0:01:28in the realms of the dead, had killed himself
0:01:28 > 0:01:35and now had in London something like his own mausoleum.
0:02:01 > 0:02:04Which is why in the spring of 1970,
0:02:04 > 0:02:09I didn't feel in much of a hurry to see the newly installed paintings.
0:02:09 > 0:02:14A monument to ANOTHER fallen American abstract painter,
0:02:14 > 0:02:16it smacked too much of reverence.
0:02:16 > 0:02:21And we weren't into reverence that much, not in 970.
0:02:21 > 0:02:23We were into playtime
0:02:23 > 0:02:30- Andy Warhol, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, wham-shazam!
0:02:30 > 0:02:33Preferably while listening to rock and roll
0:02:33 > 0:02:38and getting, well, not high minded at any rate.
0:02:38 > 0:02:43# Andy Warhol looks a scream hanging on my wall
0:02:43 > 0:02:49# Andy Warhol, silver screen Can't tell them apart at all... #
0:02:54 > 0:02:58The idea that art should be solemn was a turn-off,
0:02:58 > 0:03:01a bit like being made to go to church.
0:03:03 > 0:03:10The fact that Mark Rothko had joined the roll call of suicidal abstract painters by killing himself
0:03:10 > 0:03:14only made the prospect more funereal.
0:03:16 > 0:03:21On the other hand, I was keen to take another look at Francis Bacon.
0:03:27 > 0:03:33So one morning in the spring of 1970, into the Tate Gallery I went,
0:03:33 > 0:03:37walked down here and took a wrong right turn.
0:03:44 > 0:03:46And there they were,
0:03:46 > 0:03:48lying in wait.
0:04:09 > 0:04:12No, it wasn't love at first sight.
0:04:12 > 0:04:17Rothko had insisted the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low.
0:04:17 > 0:04:23It was like going into a cinema, expectation in the dimness.
0:04:25 > 0:04:29Something in there was doing a steady throb,
0:04:29 > 0:04:33pulsing like the inside of a body part,
0:04:33 > 0:04:36all crimson and purple.
0:04:42 > 0:04:46I felt pulled through those black lines
0:04:46 > 0:04:49into some mysterious place in the universe.
0:05:24 > 0:05:29Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure
0:05:29 > 0:05:30into an unknown space.
0:05:30 > 0:05:33I wasn't sure where I was being taken.
0:05:33 > 0:05:35I wasn't even sure I wanted to go.
0:05:35 > 0:05:38I only knew that I had no choice
0:05:38 > 0:05:44and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic.
0:06:02 > 0:06:06They say that money follows art.
0:06:06 > 0:06:09Well, art quite likes money too.
0:06:09 > 0:06:13In fact, there's nothing a painter likes more than a wealthy patron.
0:06:13 > 0:06:16So papal Rome had its Caravaggio.
0:06:16 > 0:06:2017th century Amsterdam had its Rembrandt.
0:06:20 > 0:06:26When, in 1958, the Canadian liquor company Seagrams wanted a painter
0:06:26 > 0:06:28to decorate their New York headquarters,
0:06:28 > 0:06:32there was only one possible choice - Mark Rothko.
0:06:38 > 0:06:43The 55-year-old painter was at the peak of his fame.
0:06:44 > 0:06:50Between 1954-1957, his paintings had trebled in price.
0:06:53 > 0:06:57Representing America at the Venice Biennale,
0:06:57 > 0:07:00another five of his paintings were on tour in Europe
0:07:00 > 0:07:04to prove to the world that the United States had depth
0:07:04 > 0:07:05and not just dazzle.
0:07:10 > 0:07:14He was the greatest living American painter.
0:07:18 > 0:07:21Or so they said.
0:07:24 > 0:07:26In 1958, maybe,
0:07:26 > 0:07:32but he'd gone through 30 years of financial hardship and mental struggle,
0:07:32 > 0:07:37wrestling with the biggest question of all - what could art do?
0:07:37 > 0:07:41Could it cut through the white noise of daily life,
0:07:41 > 0:07:45connect us with the basic emotions that make us human
0:07:45 > 0:07:52- ecstasy, anguish, desire, terror?
0:07:58 > 0:08:04The architect of the Seagram building approached Rothko to do something for the Four Seasons,
0:08:04 > 0:08:10the ritzy restaurant that would occupy the ground floor of the Manhattan skyscraper.
0:08:17 > 0:08:22In exchange for some 500-600 square feet of paintings,
0:08:22 > 0:08:26they agreed to pay Rothko 35,000.
0:08:28 > 0:08:33That's about 2.5 million today.
0:08:33 > 0:08:37As commissions go, they didn't come any bigger.
0:08:51 > 0:08:55Anyone else would have jumped at such an offer.
0:08:55 > 0:08:57But not Rothko.
0:08:57 > 0:09:01He thought long and hard about it, talked to all his friends,
0:09:01 > 0:09:06turned it over and over in his mind. Why?
0:09:06 > 0:09:10Because he was ambivalent, and not just about the commission,
0:09:10 > 0:09:17but about American capitalism, about his own American success story.
0:09:28 > 0:09:31Born in Russia in 1903,
0:09:31 > 0:09:34Rothko would later say that as a child he could remember
0:09:34 > 0:09:38the local Cossacks indulging in their favourite activity...
0:09:42 > 0:09:46..beating up Jews.
0:09:48 > 0:09:51In the first years of the 20th century,
0:09:51 > 0:09:55America opened its arms to the Rothkowitzes from Dvinsk,
0:09:55 > 0:10:02as it did to millions of other Jews coming though Ellis Island to the goldene medina,
0:10:02 > 0:10:03the golden city.
0:10:09 > 0:10:12Now, there were two kinds of Jews in America
0:10:12 > 0:10:16- those who plunged into the muck and mayhem of business
0:10:16 > 0:10:22and those who brought with them from the old world the most precious thing they had - culture.
0:10:27 > 0:10:33Rothkowitz Senior was the second kind, a dreamy, bookish pharmacist,
0:10:33 > 0:10:39happier talking to his children about Dostoevsky and Dickens than doing the accounts.
0:10:40 > 0:10:44He scraped enough together to bring little Markus and the rest of the family
0:10:44 > 0:10:48out of the miseries of the old country
0:10:48 > 0:10:51and died of cancer six months later.
0:10:51 > 0:10:56The Rothkowitz children were brought up by their mother, Anna.
0:10:57 > 0:11:00I knew this kind of kid, grew up with him.
0:11:02 > 0:11:04Went to Hebrew school,
0:11:06 > 0:11:10read every sort of book he could get his hands on.
0:11:10 > 0:11:14Played not just the violin but the mandolin, wow!
0:11:17 > 0:11:21Grown-ups called him a know-it-all.
0:11:25 > 0:11:28Mark was the smart one,
0:11:28 > 0:11:31the one who was gonna make it,
0:11:31 > 0:11:34and he wanted to please his mother.
0:11:35 > 0:11:42He was just your soup-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew
0:11:42 > 0:11:48in the grip of mighty ideas and desperate to tell you all about them.
0:11:48 > 0:11:52Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around,
0:11:52 > 0:11:56a big heart and a big mouth to match.
0:11:58 > 0:11:59You know the type.
0:11:59 > 0:12:04Rothko won a scholarship to Yale University.
0:12:04 > 0:12:11But Yale wasn't even sure it wanted Jews at all and introduced a quota.
0:12:11 > 0:12:13Rothko quickly realised
0:12:13 > 0:12:18you didn't need a sabre-wielding Cossack to feel unloved.
0:12:23 > 0:12:26He dropped out.
0:12:26 > 0:12:31But he never was the kind of Jew who wanted to be a lawyer or a stockbroker.
0:12:31 > 0:12:35He was the other kind, the one with the creative itch,
0:12:35 > 0:12:40the one who thought art could change the world.
0:12:43 > 0:12:47It's precisely because he really believed this
0:12:47 > 0:12:52that 30 years later, he couldn't walk away from the Seagram job,
0:12:52 > 0:12:56the greatest challenge of his career.
0:13:00 > 0:13:06Rothko rented a vast space at 222 Bowery in an old gym.
0:13:29 > 0:13:33Every day, he'd arrive in the morning at 8.30,
0:13:33 > 0:13:36change into his painting clothes and get down to work.
0:13:44 > 0:13:47As he started work in the spring of 1958,
0:13:47 > 0:13:51Rothko envisaged the Seagram murals
0:13:51 > 0:13:53as a kind of wordless teaching,
0:13:53 > 0:13:57an antidote to the triviality of modern life.
0:14:06 > 0:14:08But what could they say?
0:14:12 > 0:14:15And how could they say it?
0:14:15 > 0:14:20One of the basic problems of the commission was its sheer size.
0:14:20 > 0:14:25Everything that Rothko had done so far had been on a human scale, personal.
0:14:25 > 0:14:30But this was public and Manhattan was watching.
0:14:31 > 0:14:36A picture lives by companionship,
0:14:36 > 0:14:40expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
0:14:42 > 0:14:44It dies by the same token.
0:14:46 > 0:14:52It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act...
0:14:53 > 0:14:56..to send it out into the world.
0:15:12 > 0:15:15Just like the Old Masters he so admired,
0:15:15 > 0:15:20Rothko prepared his canvasses with traditional rabbit skin glue.
0:15:37 > 0:15:43He worked fast and they would sit sometimes for hours, sometimes days.
0:16:06 > 0:16:09When someone asked a few years later
0:16:09 > 0:16:15how long it took to paint one of his paintings, he replied, "57 years."
0:16:22 > 0:16:27When he arrived here back in the 1920s, of course no-one noticed.
0:16:27 > 0:16:32He was just another lost soul in jazz age New York.
0:16:32 > 0:16:36But then he wasn't really into bootleg and boogie-woogie,
0:16:36 > 0:16:39more like Marx and Mozart.
0:16:39 > 0:16:43He was burning to do something about the modern world,
0:16:43 > 0:16:47something in the opposite mood to Busby Berkeley.
0:16:52 > 0:16:55Rothko had come to New York in 1923
0:16:55 > 0:17:01to "wander around, bum about and starve a bit," he later said.
0:17:03 > 0:17:06He enrolled in an art class
0:17:06 > 0:17:10and to make ends meet, taught kids at a Jewish community centre.
0:17:12 > 0:17:17When he stood in the Brooklyn classroom, it all seemed so easy.
0:17:17 > 0:17:20He'd tell the children not to mind the rules.
0:17:20 > 0:17:24"Painting," he said "was as natural as singing, it should be like music."
0:17:24 > 0:17:29But when he tried, it came out as a croak.
0:17:30 > 0:17:36It's the work of a painfully knotted imagination.
0:17:36 > 0:17:41The trouble is he was doing something the children didn't do
0:17:41 > 0:17:43- thinking too hard.
0:17:43 > 0:17:46So he dabbled in expressionism.
0:17:46 > 0:17:49Thick dark paint, sketchy lines.
0:17:49 > 0:17:54Pedlars, Jews on the street.
0:17:55 > 0:17:58The thighs that ate Coney Island.
0:17:59 > 0:18:02No, not very good.
0:18:06 > 0:18:13What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?
0:18:13 > 0:18:17Son of Man, you cannot say or guess,
0:18:17 > 0:18:21for you know only a heap of broken images where the sun beams
0:18:21 > 0:18:25and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
0:18:25 > 0:18:29and the dry stone no sound of water.
0:18:30 > 0:18:35The Subway Series were the first paintings by Rothko
0:18:35 > 0:18:37that catch you off guard,
0:18:37 > 0:18:43full of the bleak alienation of men and women in TS Eliot's Waste Land,
0:18:43 > 0:18:46they have a compelling strangeness.
0:18:46 > 0:18:48He took an everyday urban scene
0:18:48 > 0:18:52and loaded it with the clammy sensation of doom.
0:18:54 > 0:18:57Were these commuters from Brooklyn
0:18:57 > 0:19:00or wandering souls trapped in purgatory?
0:19:00 > 0:19:06Orpheus looking for Eurydice on the uptown D train?
0:19:06 > 0:19:11The architecture of the subway with its mournful rows of columns
0:19:11 > 0:19:14snagged his attention.
0:19:14 > 0:19:18But the real action is going on with the colours themselves.
0:19:18 > 0:19:23Look at the platform edge, that brilliant crimson smear,
0:19:23 > 0:19:24and you can see what Rothko meant
0:19:24 > 0:19:27when he called his colours "performers".
0:19:32 > 0:19:35It was a dramatic departure.
0:19:35 > 0:19:39But getting there as a painter would take him another 20 years.
0:19:49 > 0:19:54In 1958, three months into the Seagram commission,
0:19:54 > 0:19:56Rothko gave a lecture.
0:19:56 > 0:19:59It was the last time he'd have anything to say about art,
0:19:59 > 0:20:04and it's the closest insight we have as to how he saw his painting.
0:20:07 > 0:20:13The tragic notion of the image...
0:20:14 > 0:20:16..is always present in my mind.
0:20:23 > 0:20:26I can't point it out.
0:20:27 > 0:20:30There are no skull and bones.
0:20:40 > 0:20:43The whole problem of art, he said,
0:20:43 > 0:20:49is to establish human values in this specific civilisation,
0:20:49 > 0:20:54denying it was anything psychological or internal or revelatory about his work.
0:20:54 > 0:20:59He said, "No, no. It's about and of the world."
0:20:59 > 0:21:03Then he went on to list all the ingredients that make up a Rothko painting,
0:21:03 > 0:21:06from sensuality through irony to death.
0:21:06 > 0:21:11"A sense of the tragic," he said, "is always with me when I paint."
0:21:25 > 0:21:31And it was this unbearably weighty feeling for human tragedy
0:21:31 > 0:21:34that Rothko wanted to bring into the Four Seasons.
0:21:40 > 0:21:42It would be his greatest project.
0:21:57 > 0:22:03I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions
0:22:03 > 0:22:07- tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.
0:22:07 > 0:22:14And the fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures
0:22:14 > 0:22:20shows that I communicate those basic emotions.
0:22:28 > 0:22:31But it always had been uphill for Rothko.
0:22:31 > 0:22:38The '30s hadn't exactly been the best time to be an artist in New York,
0:22:38 > 0:22:43not much of a market for painters, struggling or otherwise.
0:22:49 > 0:22:56Although he had shortened and changed his name from Markus to Mark and Rothkowitz to Rothko,
0:22:56 > 0:23:00he certainly hadn't found his way in painting.
0:23:00 > 0:23:06With every show he went to at the Museum of Modern Art, Dada in '36,
0:23:06 > 0:23:13Picasso in '39, the modern masters made him feel worse, floundering.
0:23:13 > 0:23:18Only Matisse's Red Studio, which he saw in 1949,
0:23:18 > 0:23:21finally switched something on.
0:23:23 > 0:23:25Maybe it had something to do
0:23:25 > 0:23:30with what Matisse did to liberate colour from specific objects.
0:23:30 > 0:23:34Things no longer have a colour, the painting does.
0:23:34 > 0:23:36But back in the '30s,
0:23:36 > 0:23:41Rothko was still thinking too hard to paint like this.
0:23:41 > 0:23:45Instead of following his instinct,
0:23:45 > 0:23:50he went back to his books - Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy,
0:23:50 > 0:23:52Nietzsche's birth of tragedy,
0:23:52 > 0:23:57great monolithic slabs of the big ideas he chain-smoked his way through.
0:23:57 > 0:24:01And then he tried to get the sense of tragic brutality
0:24:01 > 0:24:07- this is what humans do, over and over again - down on canvas.
0:24:13 > 0:24:17No problem finding the tragic in these pictures.
0:24:19 > 0:24:24Myths and monsters, Syrian bulls, Egyptian hawks,
0:24:24 > 0:24:27half-men half-beasts,
0:24:27 > 0:24:32slither, hiss and peck like an ancient frieze.
0:24:32 > 0:24:39Slaughter, sacrifice and disembowelment by the yard.
0:24:46 > 0:24:51But Rothko's archaeological excursions in the land of the dead
0:24:51 > 0:24:54were overtaken by the real world.
0:25:06 > 0:25:07The war happened.
0:25:13 > 0:25:14Not for Rothko
0:25:14 > 0:25:21- classified 4F, unfit for service due to acute short-sightedness.
0:25:22 > 0:25:27But Rothko knew the conflict was a crossroads for art.
0:25:39 > 0:25:43With civilisation facing annihilation,
0:25:43 > 0:25:48it was up to America to save Western culture from fascism,
0:25:48 > 0:25:53not just by offering safe haven to refugee painters from Europe
0:25:53 > 0:25:58but by doing something brave, something fresh,
0:25:58 > 0:26:01something equal to the times.
0:26:03 > 0:26:08Easier said - and they said it a lot - than done.
0:26:09 > 0:26:12Barnett Newman, one of Rothko's closest friends,
0:26:12 > 0:26:18issues another manifesto that sums up the way the group felt.
0:26:18 > 0:26:21"In a moral crisis of a world in shambles,"
0:26:21 > 0:26:26he says, "it was no longer possible to go on painting the old stuff.
0:26:26 > 0:26:29"Flowers, reclining nudes."
0:26:29 > 0:26:34So Newman just gives up painting for four years.
0:27:20 > 0:27:22By the spring of 1959,
0:27:22 > 0:27:27Rothko had almost completed work on the Seagram job.
0:27:34 > 0:27:36Exhausted by his endeavour,
0:27:36 > 0:27:40he took a three-month vacation to Europe with his wife and daughter.
0:27:45 > 0:27:47HORN SOUNDS
0:27:52 > 0:27:56We get an insight into how he was feeling from a reported conversation
0:27:56 > 0:28:00he had at the bar on the transatlantic ocean liner.
0:28:00 > 0:28:03He railed against these "sons of bitches"
0:28:03 > 0:28:05who'd be dining beneath his art,
0:28:05 > 0:28:09hoped his paintings would "ruin their appetite".
0:28:09 > 0:28:13Increasingly, he'd come to see the commission
0:28:13 > 0:28:17as a gladiatorial contest - Mark versus Manhattan.
0:28:17 > 0:28:21He talked the talk, but it sounds a lot like Dutch courage.
0:28:21 > 0:28:24Offensive, anxious.
0:28:29 > 0:28:33Rothko had always wanted to give his paintings
0:28:33 > 0:28:36the emotional force of the Old Masters.
0:28:37 > 0:28:42On a previous trip to Europe in 1950, he'd done the Grand Tour.
0:28:42 > 0:28:45And in Florence, he'd visited what was to be
0:28:45 > 0:28:49a major inspiration for the Seagram murals,
0:28:49 > 0:28:53Michelangelo's library in the Church of San Lorenzo.
0:29:04 > 0:29:07After I'd been at work for some time,
0:29:07 > 0:29:12I realised that I was much influenced subconsciously
0:29:12 > 0:29:15by Michelangelo's walls...
0:29:15 > 0:29:17in the staircase room
0:29:17 > 0:29:20of the Medician library in Florence.
0:29:22 > 0:29:27He achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after.
0:29:29 > 0:29:31He makes the viewers feel...
0:29:31 > 0:29:37they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.
0:29:37 > 0:29:41So all they can do is butt their heads against the wall...
0:29:43 > 0:29:44forever.
0:29:52 > 0:29:57That was the feeling Mark Rothko wanted to give to the people
0:29:57 > 0:30:01who'd soon been eating in Manhattan's smartest restaurant.
0:30:06 > 0:30:10Rothko and the other New York artists looked in America
0:30:10 > 0:30:15and found a country caught between the bomb and the supermarket...
0:30:18 > 0:30:22..Korea and the Cold War...
0:30:22 > 0:30:25paranoia and distraction.
0:30:26 > 0:30:31It was an unreal manufactured way of life.
0:30:31 > 0:30:35So their paintings would fight back.
0:30:35 > 0:30:39They'd reconnect people with physical reality,
0:30:39 > 0:30:43with the truth of what it was to be human,
0:30:43 > 0:30:46and they'd do it in a totally new way.
0:30:49 > 0:30:53After the Holocaust and the atom bomb,
0:30:53 > 0:30:58Rothko said you couldn't paint figures without mutilating them.
0:30:58 > 0:31:04So, could just colours and shapes move us the way Michelangelo had?
0:31:04 > 0:31:10De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko all certainly thought so,
0:31:10 > 0:31:12abandoning painting things
0:31:12 > 0:31:16to strive for a new, pure expression of feeling.
0:31:22 > 0:31:26At once visionary and revelatory,
0:31:26 > 0:31:29unlike nothing in the history of art -
0:31:29 > 0:31:31a new world on a canvas.
0:31:34 > 0:31:40Rothko also said that paintings needed to be miraculous.
0:31:40 > 0:31:46You could say the world had never been more badly in need of miracles.
0:31:52 > 0:31:54And what he was painting was,
0:31:54 > 0:31:58for the first time, stunningly dramatic.
0:31:58 > 0:32:02Rothko's multiforms have a movement all of their own,
0:32:02 > 0:32:06swelling and dissolving,
0:32:06 > 0:32:08staining and seeping.
0:32:08 > 0:32:13Sometimes they seem to hover over the canvas,
0:32:13 > 0:32:17as if we were looking down at layers of coloured cloud,
0:32:17 > 0:32:21mysteriously blooming and fading.
0:32:21 > 0:32:26At other times, the colours seem more stridently embattled.
0:32:26 > 0:32:32It was all very seductive, loose and pretty.
0:32:32 > 0:32:35Rothko started to sell
0:32:35 > 0:32:40but he knew the difference between prettiness and power.
0:32:40 > 0:32:43And it was power that he was after -
0:32:43 > 0:32:49the power to take people somewhere they would recover their humanity.
0:32:49 > 0:32:53When they were first shown in Manhattan in the 1950s,
0:32:53 > 0:32:57these big spellbinding paintings were immediately recognised
0:32:57 > 0:33:01as a body of work that made the case for American painting
0:33:01 > 0:33:04in an utterly new way -
0:33:04 > 0:33:08emotionally stirring, sensuously addictive.
0:33:17 > 0:33:22Big vertical canvasses of contrasting bars of colour.
0:33:24 > 0:33:28Panels of colour stacked up on top of each other,
0:33:28 > 0:33:31shimmering, glowing,
0:33:31 > 0:33:33beckoning you into some sort of
0:33:33 > 0:33:38deep, undefined, radiant yonder.
0:33:38 > 0:33:40Rothko had become the maker of paintings
0:33:40 > 0:33:43as powerful and complicated
0:33:43 > 0:33:48as anything by his two gods, Rembrandt and Turner.
0:33:50 > 0:33:55For me, these paintings are the equivalent of those Old Masters.
0:33:55 > 0:34:02Like them, they emanate an uncanny force field so strongly magnetic
0:34:02 > 0:34:05that, when you turn your back on them or leave the room,
0:34:05 > 0:34:08you can still sense their presence.
0:34:10 > 0:34:14Quite suddenly in 1949,
0:34:14 > 0:34:19the new language of feeling Rothko had been groping towards for two decades
0:34:19 > 0:34:21finally revealed itself.
0:34:25 > 0:34:30To the old world of art, Europe, where the veterans of modernism -
0:34:30 > 0:34:35Salvador Dali, Picasso - were still pottering around to ever less effect,
0:34:35 > 0:34:39Rothko's paintings seemed to give the lie
0:34:39 > 0:34:43to anyone accusing American culture of shallowness.
0:34:43 > 0:34:47For whatever else these throbbing paintings were,
0:34:47 > 0:34:50they were unmistakably deep.
0:34:53 > 0:34:58Rothko had accomplished something utterly original.
0:34:59 > 0:35:01It's not what the colours are
0:35:01 > 0:35:04that makes the paintings work on our senses...
0:35:05 > 0:35:08it's what Rothko makes them do.
0:35:11 > 0:35:16While at first sight these paintings seem so still and composed,
0:35:16 > 0:35:19hang around for a moment and you'll see they're anything but -
0:35:19 > 0:35:21they're in motion.
0:35:21 > 0:35:28They seem to swell and breathe and fill like sails catching the wind.
0:35:28 > 0:35:32They're not paintings that just dumbly wait to be watched -
0:35:32 > 0:35:34they come and get us.
0:35:34 > 0:35:38And we surrender to total immersion.
0:35:51 > 0:35:56Often talked about as some kind of transcendental philosopher,
0:35:56 > 0:36:00Rothko was at pains to deny ever being a mystic.
0:36:00 > 0:36:06"No," he said, "what I'm giving you, what I love, is material experience,
0:36:06 > 0:36:11"the sensuousness of the world in all its richness."
0:36:14 > 0:36:18And none of this tantalising of the eye would work
0:36:18 > 0:36:22had Rothko not been the most soft-edged of all painters.
0:36:24 > 0:36:28Look at how important those ragged borders are,
0:36:28 > 0:36:31both at the perimeter of the whole picture
0:36:31 > 0:36:37and in those torn seams he cuts between the big colour zones.
0:36:38 > 0:36:43That inner light, mysterious and potent.
0:36:43 > 0:36:44When people beheld it,
0:36:44 > 0:36:48for hours they could hold nothing else in their mind's eye.
0:36:56 > 0:37:00Rothko wanted an intimate personal connection to be made
0:37:00 > 0:37:03for his paintings to exert their full power.
0:37:03 > 0:37:08A total control freak, he had to be in charge of absolutely everything.
0:37:08 > 0:37:12Lighting - low, position on the wall - even lower.
0:37:12 > 0:37:17When somebody asked him how close to the pictures they should stand,
0:37:17 > 0:37:22he answered, "Right back. Oh, about 18 inches."
0:37:29 > 0:37:36Between 1954 and 1957, the prices for Rothko's paintings trebled.
0:37:36 > 0:37:40The big museums down the street from his studio
0:37:40 > 0:37:45that he'd attacked in the 1930s now all wanted a piece of him.
0:37:45 > 0:37:50Buyers who were busy creating collections of modern American masters
0:37:50 > 0:37:56now had to have a Rothko along with their Pollocks, their De Koonings and their Klines.
0:37:56 > 0:38:01So did this mean that Mark Rothko finally could relax a little,
0:38:01 > 0:38:04bask in the glow of his success?
0:38:04 > 0:38:06Did it hell!
0:38:09 > 0:38:15It was vital to him that his pictures were not sedatives.
0:38:15 > 0:38:19In the 1950s, people were always being told to relax.
0:38:19 > 0:38:23Well, Rothko didn't want his pictures to be like a massage.
0:38:23 > 0:38:26"They were," he said, "the opposite of restful.
0:38:26 > 0:38:30"Tragic performances, violent, sacrificial,
0:38:30 > 0:38:35"evoking the most extreme sensations of doom and ecstasy."
0:38:37 > 0:38:43One does not paint for design students or historians
0:38:43 > 0:38:45but for human beings.
0:38:45 > 0:38:47Hmm?
0:38:52 > 0:38:56And the reaction, in human terms,
0:38:56 > 0:39:01is the only thing that is really satisfactory
0:39:01 > 0:39:03to the artist.
0:39:14 > 0:39:17I think what he feared most of all
0:39:17 > 0:39:20was to be told how very "beautiful" his pictures were,
0:39:20 > 0:39:24even though they were, and are, exactly that,
0:39:28 > 0:39:30because the "B" word rang alarm bells
0:39:30 > 0:39:36that they might be treated as no more than interior decoration for the rich.
0:40:14 > 0:40:17The people who weep before my paintings...
0:40:20 > 0:40:25are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
0:40:31 > 0:40:33So what was he doing
0:40:33 > 0:40:37signing up for the ultimate job in interior decoration -
0:40:37 > 0:40:40supplying paintings to the Four Seasons restaurant?
0:40:40 > 0:40:42The place where he said,
0:40:42 > 0:40:47"The richest bastards in New York would come to feed and show off."
0:40:47 > 0:40:52Was it a shameful sell-out of all his most adamantly held principles?
0:40:52 > 0:40:56Or was Rothko, in effect, throwing down the gauntlet
0:40:56 > 0:40:59saying, "Right, eat this"?
0:41:02 > 0:41:07Now the Four Seasons isn't just a guzzling trough for the Tiffany classes.
0:41:07 > 0:41:10It occupies the ground floor of a skyscraper
0:41:10 > 0:41:14designed by the darling of the modernist international style -
0:41:14 > 0:41:16Mies van der Rohe.
0:41:16 > 0:41:19Whatever else you can say about the Seagram building,
0:41:19 > 0:41:23the corporate headquarters of the Canadian liquor giant,
0:41:23 > 0:41:25it isn't vulgar.
0:41:27 > 0:41:30Slender and razor sharp,
0:41:30 > 0:41:33the building broods over mid-town Manhattan.
0:41:36 > 0:41:39Inside the Four Seasons itself,
0:41:39 > 0:41:45its half-sunken floor, fig trees, reflecting pools and modernist furniture
0:41:45 > 0:41:50aspire to a kind of understated neo-classicism,
0:41:50 > 0:41:54an urban villa for the Vogue set.
0:41:57 > 0:41:59Still, whichever way you cut it,
0:41:59 > 0:42:04it was a restaurant - a 4.5 million restaurant.
0:42:17 > 0:42:21But it wasn't quite that simple.
0:42:21 > 0:42:24There were things about the commission that were flattering,
0:42:24 > 0:42:26challenging in a positive way.
0:42:26 > 0:42:31The fact that there were now all those glamorous apartments with his pictures in them
0:42:31 > 0:42:35sharpened Rothko's need to work in some sort of public space,
0:42:35 > 0:42:41make it over into what he called "a place, his place".
0:42:41 > 0:42:44What bigger test could there be?
0:42:44 > 0:42:48If it was haute cuisine versus art, his art,
0:42:48 > 0:42:52the truffled sole meuniere didn't stand a chance,
0:42:52 > 0:42:55art would vanquish appetite.
0:42:58 > 0:43:03His series of darkly glowing paintings, tightly packed together,
0:43:03 > 0:43:06would hang four and a half feet up on those walls,
0:43:06 > 0:43:10looming over the diners, swallowing the swallowers.
0:43:10 > 0:43:15His whole desire was to replace those restaurant walls altogether.
0:43:15 > 0:43:22Something profound would happen to the vain and the shallow as they tucked into their caviar
0:43:22 > 0:43:28and their lobster thermidor, as they surrendered to the power of art - his art.
0:43:46 > 0:43:51Early in 1959, like some omnipotent sorcerer,
0:43:51 > 0:43:54Rothko painted Red On Maroon,
0:43:54 > 0:43:59one of the most dramatic of the murals destined for the Four Seasons.
0:44:04 > 0:44:09With the vision of Michelangelo's blind windows burnt on his retina,
0:44:09 > 0:44:12he turned his paintings on their side.
0:44:15 > 0:44:22Instead of uprights, they were now expansive horizontals.
0:44:22 > 0:44:26What had been shutter-like bars of darkness and light
0:44:26 > 0:44:30became something akin to load-bearing columns.
0:44:36 > 0:44:41And the load they were bearing was human history.
0:44:45 > 0:44:49That autumn, months after the glamorous opening,
0:44:49 > 0:44:54he and his wife Mel went to eat at the Four Seasons.
0:44:58 > 0:45:03Rothko was someone who thought it was immoral to spend more than five bucks on a meal,
0:45:03 > 0:45:09and was often perfectly happy with a Chinese takeaway - the cheaper, the better.
0:45:09 > 0:45:15But as he sat among the millionaires with Mel, his heart and his confidence sank like a stone.
0:45:20 > 0:45:26Anybody who will eat that kind of food for that kind of money
0:45:26 > 0:45:29will never look at a painting of mine.
0:45:41 > 0:45:44The next morning, he looked at the 30 or so paintings...
0:45:46 > 0:45:49some of the most beautiful and moving things,
0:45:49 > 0:45:53not only Rothko but any modern artist had ever created...
0:45:54 > 0:45:58and saw only the ruin of a great project.
0:46:03 > 0:46:07His paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons.
0:46:09 > 0:46:12Manhattan had beaten Mark.
0:46:17 > 0:46:22Or had art triumphed over money?
0:46:22 > 0:46:25After all, how many artists do you know
0:46:25 > 0:46:29who would say "no" to 2.5 million?
0:46:43 > 0:46:47Rothko had made sure his contract gave him ownership of the pictures
0:46:47 > 0:46:50if the job went sour.
0:46:54 > 0:46:57It was almost as if he always hoped that one day,
0:46:57 > 0:46:59somewhere else perhaps,
0:46:59 > 0:47:05he would be able to resurrect his idea to make a space, his space.
0:47:21 > 0:47:25Later that year, a curator came to invite him to exhibit
0:47:25 > 0:47:28in the Cassel Art Fair in Germany.
0:47:45 > 0:47:48When I was a younger man...
0:47:49 > 0:47:52art was a lonely thing.
0:47:53 > 0:47:57No galleries, no collectors...
0:47:59 > 0:48:02no critics...
0:48:02 > 0:48:04no money.
0:48:04 > 0:48:06Yet it was a golden age...
0:48:08 > 0:48:11for we all had nothing to lose
0:48:11 > 0:48:14and a vision to gain.
0:48:18 > 0:48:21Today it is not quite the same.
0:48:22 > 0:48:27It is a time of tons of verbiage,
0:48:27 > 0:48:30activity, consumption.
0:48:37 > 0:48:40Which condition is better for the world at large?
0:48:42 > 0:48:45I will not venture to discuss.
0:48:45 > 0:48:48But I do know
0:48:48 > 0:48:52that many of those who are driven to this life
0:48:52 > 0:48:57are desperately searching for those pockets of silence...
0:48:58 > 0:49:00where we can root...
0:49:01 > 0:49:03and grow.
0:49:09 > 0:49:12We must all hope we find them.
0:49:18 > 0:49:24The man who'd taken a stand for art over money made the German an offer.
0:49:28 > 0:49:31"If you build a chapel of expiation for the Holocaust,"
0:49:31 > 0:49:37he said, "it need only be a tent, I'll paint you something for free."
0:49:41 > 0:49:42It never happened.
0:49:55 > 0:49:58Mark Rothko spent the next ten years -
0:49:58 > 0:50:01all that he had left of his life -
0:50:01 > 0:50:04searching for that perfect wayside chapel
0:50:04 > 0:50:09where he could realise the vision that had been frustrated at the Four Seasons.
0:50:09 > 0:50:13A one-man show in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art,
0:50:13 > 0:50:16which he went to every single day,
0:50:16 > 0:50:21brought him some cheer, and his work was selling better than ever.
0:50:21 > 0:50:25But with success, his life actually got shabbier.
0:50:25 > 0:50:29His tippling, which began at ten o'clock in the morning,
0:50:29 > 0:50:32developed into serious alcoholism.
0:50:32 > 0:50:35And his chain smoking, a lifelong habit,
0:50:35 > 0:50:38brought him heart and lung problems.
0:50:38 > 0:50:42And his second marriage was breaking up.
0:50:42 > 0:50:48Shadowed by melancholy, his work got darker and more intense,
0:50:48 > 0:50:52just as modern art was going pop!
0:50:54 > 0:50:58For Rothko, painting had always been an alternative to pop culture,
0:50:58 > 0:51:00not its accomplice.
0:51:02 > 0:51:06But this seemed to be what the galleries wanted now.
0:51:06 > 0:51:10Stuck in the mode of painting he'd been doing for 15 years,
0:51:10 > 0:51:13he was defensive, angry.
0:51:19 > 0:51:23So when he did break out of his old style,
0:51:23 > 0:51:28it was to go raven black, as black as Texas oil.
0:51:59 > 0:52:06Texas finally provided Rothko with a chance to realise the vision thwarted in the Four Seasons.
0:52:11 > 0:52:15Art patrons John and Dominique de Menil commissioned him
0:52:15 > 0:52:17to produce a set of murals
0:52:17 > 0:52:20for a chapel to be built in Houston in 1965...
0:52:25 > 0:52:29giving Rothko freedom to install exactly what he wanted.
0:52:34 > 0:52:39If the Four Seasons paintings were content to make a gesture at the other world,
0:52:39 > 0:52:43the Houston chapel buries you in a tomb.
0:52:43 > 0:52:47Tanks of ink have been spilt trying to persuade us
0:52:47 > 0:52:51that this place is not as dark and funereal as it seems.
0:52:51 > 0:52:55A systematic dimming of the light that had always burned intensely
0:52:55 > 0:52:58in Rothko's greatest works.
0:52:58 > 0:53:04But, quite honestly, sitting here, do we feel bright and beautiful?
0:53:04 > 0:53:06I'm not sure.
0:53:14 > 0:53:17Those rippling edges flaring with light,
0:53:17 > 0:53:23which gave Rothko's pictures so much of their movement, have gone.
0:53:23 > 0:53:26In their place, an inky night.
0:53:34 > 0:53:36It's almost as though he's painting
0:53:36 > 0:53:40to see how dark he can make the light.
0:53:42 > 0:53:44Good luck...
0:53:46 > 0:53:47and good night?
0:53:50 > 0:53:56It's hard not to feel the Houston chapel isn't some sort of live burial,
0:53:56 > 0:54:00an internment not just of Rothko's future
0:54:00 > 0:54:03but of his hopes for art.
0:54:11 > 0:54:14Then into the blackness, in painting after painting,
0:54:14 > 0:54:18came a luminous zone of milky grey...
0:54:21 > 0:54:26..like the rim of a planet lit by the moon,
0:54:26 > 0:54:31as if Rothko was already gone off into deep space,
0:54:31 > 0:54:34presiding over the moment of creation.
0:54:36 > 0:54:40Dividing the light from the darkness,
0:54:40 > 0:54:44the earth from the heavens, bent on heroic self-cremation.
0:54:52 > 0:54:57So, you see, I got it all wrong that morning in 1970.
0:55:02 > 0:55:08I'd thought seeing the Seagram paintings would be like a trip to the cemetery of abstraction,
0:55:08 > 0:55:12all dutiful reverence, a dead end.
0:55:22 > 0:55:24Look at this one,
0:55:24 > 0:55:26what do you see?
0:55:28 > 0:55:32A hanging veil suspended between two columns?
0:55:37 > 0:55:41An opening that beckons or denies entrance?
0:55:44 > 0:55:46A blind window?
0:55:48 > 0:55:51For me, it's a gateway.
0:55:59 > 0:56:03If some of those portals are blocked,
0:56:03 > 0:56:08others open into the unknown space that Rothko talked about -
0:56:08 > 0:56:11the place that only art can take us,
0:56:11 > 0:56:15far away from the buzzing static of the moment
0:56:15 > 0:56:19and towards the music of the spheres.
0:56:24 > 0:56:28Everything Rothko did to these paintings,
0:56:28 > 0:56:31the column-like form, suggested rather than drawn,
0:56:31 > 0:56:38the loose stainings, were all meant to make the surface ambiguous,
0:56:38 > 0:56:40porous,
0:56:40 > 0:56:42perhaps softly penetrable.
0:56:44 > 0:56:48A space that might be where we came from
0:56:48 > 0:56:50or where we will end up.
0:57:00 > 0:57:05They're meant not to keep us out, but to embrace.
0:57:08 > 0:57:13From an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being.
0:57:20 > 0:57:25Can anything be less cool than this room in the heart of Tate Modern?
0:57:25 > 0:57:33Further away from the razzle dazzle of contemporary art, the frantic hustle of now?
0:57:33 > 0:57:36This isn't about now, this is about forever.
0:57:36 > 0:57:41This is a place where you come to sit in the low light
0:57:41 > 0:57:43and feel the aeons rolling by,
0:57:43 > 0:57:49to be taken towards the gates that open onto the thresholds of eternity.
0:57:49 > 0:57:54To feel the poignancy of our comings and our goings,
0:57:54 > 0:57:59our entrances and our exits, our births and our deaths.
0:57:59 > 0:58:02Womb, tomb and everything between.
0:58:02 > 0:58:07Can art ever be more complete, more powerful?
0:58:07 > 0:58:08I don't think so.
0:58:30 > 0:58:34Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2006
0:58:34 > 0:58:38E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk