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| Heralding a Fate, 2010, oil on canvas, 36 x 36, private collection |
Red. The color of February. The color of anger, love, energy, danger. I infrequently paint with red, but as I did here, with the burnt umber and asphaltum, the result was something people remember. Bold, yet minimalist, I think it carries in it all the polarities of the color itself--
Rothko used a lot of red/maroons in his Four Seasons paintings which are now permanently installed at the
Tate Modern in London. Here from the NYTimes (April 2011) a review of the play Red.
Red, John Logan’s two-man bio-drama about Mark Rothko and his studio assistant.
"What do you see?” he asks in the play’s first line,
with an urgency that is part hope and part despair, with despair in the
ascendant. By this time we have looked into his eyes. What we see, above
all, is an artist seeing, and it’s impossible not to feel thrilled by
the privilege. “Red,” which arrives as fresh, yes, as paint from
its recent premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London, initially
registers as a visceral exercise in art appreciation. Fortunately
though, it turns out to be more a study in artist appreciation, a
portrait of an angry and brilliant mind that asks you to feel the shape
and texture of thoughts. Set in a New York studio on the Bowery in the
late 1950s, the play follows the initiation of Ken (the excellent
Eddie Redmayne),
a newly hired assistant, into the uncompromising aesthetic of Rothko
(1903-1970), who at that time was working on a commissioned series of
paintings for the new Four Seasons restaurant.
Rothko was known
to be a man of fierce opinions and didactic conversation, attributes
that Mr. Logan latches onto gratefully and fruitfully. Much of “Red,”
directed by Michael Grandage, unfolds as a combative Socratic dialogue
between teacher and pupil, a master class of questions and answers about
the methods and purpose of Rothko’s art. “I am not your teacher,”
Rothko says, shortly after meeting Ken. But he sure sounds like it.
Rothko, you see, wants to be understood. And that requires
understanding the whole history of Western painting, and Nietzsche and
Freud and Jung and
Shakespeare,
to cite just a few of the cultural names that are not so much dropped
as flung here. Ken, a fast learner, is soon giving as good as he gets.
Sessions in the studio become heated debates on the Apollonian and
Dionysian impulses in Rothko’s painting, per Nietzsche’s “Birth of
Tragedy.”
This may suggest an all-too-familiar Broadway recipe
for flattering middlebrows into feeling highbrow, allowing audience
members to signal their sophistication with knowing laughs at
intellectual references. Mr. Logan, whose previous work includes the
drama “Never the Sinner” and the screenplays for “Gladiator” and “The
Aviator,” doesn’t entirely avoid the expected conventions of fictional
works about real (and usually anguished) artists, an often embarrassing
genre.
But as much as any stage work I can think of, “Red”
captures the dynamic relationship between an artist and his creations.
(Only the
Stephen Sondheim and
James Lapine
musical “Sunday in the Park With George” comes to mind as being
similarly successful.) It’s one thing to say — or to have a character
say — that an artist regards his paintings as his children. But it’s
another to be able to look at that artist looking at his paintings, as
Mr. Molina’s Rothko does, with a fraught, fatherly anxiety and wonder.
These feelings are not only parental. An obsessive lover’s
possessiveness and perplexity glitter in this Rothko’s eyes like a fever
as he runs a tentative, caressing hand over a canvas or looks out at
the (unseen) painting on the fourth wall between the stage and the
audience. His own work — which is exquisitely presented in facsimile by
the designers Christopher Oram (set) and Neil Austin (lighting) in ways
that reflect Rothko’s own conscientious theatricality — seems truly to
speak to him. Watch him look up, abruptly and wounded, as if one of his
paintings has just called to him and is not necessarily saying what he
wants to hear.
That’s the primary relationship in “Red.” But
there’s another one too, of course, one that allows it to exist as a
proper play, with dialogue and confrontation and resolution. I mean the
relationship between Rothko and his protégé, though Ken might argue that
Rothko is too much a monomaniac to sustain such a human bond. Mr. Logan
presents the younger man as the voice of both a puritanical conscience
and a new generation of artists that threaten Rothko’s rule.
Ken is there to challenge his employer’s dismissal of the likes of
Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol
(all of whom Rothko says lack depth and substance), and to plant doubts
about the appropriateness of hanging contemplative paintings in a
temple of consumption like the Four Seasons. So there are assorted,
distinctly Oedipal clashes between the two men, played for all-out
dramatic fierceness, and a gloriously frenzied, feral canvas-priming
scene (staged to a swelling Gluck aria). Mr. Grandage (“Frost/Nixon,”
the
Jude Law
“Hamlet”) is a canny craftsman of the theater, and he makes sure that
the play’s intellectual arguments are sensually grounded.
Each
character is given to pointing out the reductive sentimentality and
banality in the arguments of the other, which conveniently allows Mr.
Logan to stave off criticisms of being clichéd himself. The play also
saddles Ken with some cumbersome dramatic luggage, including the
obligatory Secret From His Past and a concluding scene that rounds off
things a little too resonantly and expectedly.
Mr. Redmayne, who
last month won the Olivier Award (the British version of the Tony) for
his performance, keeps his character from ever seeming like a mere
device. His Ken has a spine and a mind of his own, and you can feel both
growing stronger throughout the play.
That he is able to hold
his own against Mr. Molina’s Rothko is no mean achievement. In his
strongest Broadway performance to date, the dauntless Mr. Molina
embraces the artist’s egotism unconditionally, and he makes us feel the
necessity of an overweening, humorless vanity and — to use a word that
for Rothko denotes a cardinal virtue — seriousness.
It’s risky
these days to play someone who speaks in grand statements and capital
letters about Art and Immortality. We’ve become accustomed to the safe
distance of winking quotation marks. But when this Rothko says there is
“tragedy in every brush stroke” of his work, we believe him. The fear
and hubris that never leave his eyes as he looks at his big but so
vulnerable paintings guarantees that.
