Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #7 Peter Campbell's "At Tate Modern"

Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon (1959), section four of the Seagram mural

Sometimes a single line impinges my consciousness, imprinting itself in my memory. Example: “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” I read that and became an instant Peter Campbell fan. It’s from his wonderful “At Tate Modern” (London Review of Books, October 23, 2008; included in his 2009 collection At…), a review of Tate Modern’s Rothko: The Late Series. The picture referred to is unidentified. Campbell described it as a “single canvas” filling most of one of the long walls. Is it Rothko’s rich “Red on Maroon” (1959)? Even a digital reproduction of that beauty radiates heat. Actually, Campbell’s evocative description could apply to almost any of Rothko’s deep red-on-maroon or red-on-red-on-red or black-on-purple-on-black murals, in which, as Campbell noted, “glazes, underpainting, overpainting, and the contrast between matt and gloss surfaces all have a part to play.”