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.”

Rothko's Harvard Murals

Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals, Holyoke Center, 1964

A special shout-out to Louis Menand for his terrific "Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos" (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, April 1, 2015), on the restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard murals, “Panel One,” “Panel Two,” and “Panel Three,” originally installed, in 1964, in the penthouse of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center, now hanging in the Harvard Art Museums, and revivified through the use of what’s known as “compensating illumination.” Menand explains:

Five digital projectors have been programmed to light the canvases so that the original colors reappear. At four o’clock every day, the projectors are turned off one by one, and the colors revert to (mostly) muddy blacks and grays. You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone. As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.

Menand says that the restoration story gets people hooked “because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art.”

Well, maybe. Could it also be that to look at them is to experience the exhilaration and pleasure of reading red on maroon, purple-black on purple, and maroon on pink? Menand is a tad too thinky. But he’s onto a great subject.  

Sundays With Updike: "Gradations of Black"

Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting 33 (1963), Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch (1959), Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red (1958), Clyfford Still’s Untitled (1958), and Franz Klein’s Mahoning (1956) are five of the twentieth century’s purest abstract paintings, so opaque they seem to defy interpretation. Enter John Updike. He delighted in teasing meaning from abstraction. In his great 24-line poem “Gradations of Black” (The New Yorker, August 13, 1984), he visits the “third floor, Whitney Museum,” views these five famous abstracts, and ingeniously finds semblances in each of them.

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting 33 (1963)

He says, “Ad Reinhardt’s black, in ‘Abstract Painting 33,’ / seems atmosphere, leading the eye into / that darkness where, self-awakened, we / grope for the bathroom switch; no light goes on, / but we come to see that the corners of his square / black canvas are squares slightly, slightly brown.”

Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch (1959)

He compares Stella’s striped, gray-on-black, “lustrous and granular” Die Fahne Hoch to “the shiny hide / of some hairless, geometrical reptile.”

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red (1958)

Regarding Rothko’s Four Darks in Red, he says it “holds grief; small lakes of sheen reflect the light, / and the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed / by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag / that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.”

Clyfford Still, Untitled (1958)

He says that Still, in his Untitled, “has laid on black in flakes of hardening tar, / a dragon’s scales so slick this viewer’s head / is mirrored, a murky helmet, as he stands / waiting for the flame-shaped passion to clear.”

Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956)

And on Franz Kline’s Mahoning, he observes its “barred radiance; now each / black gobby girder has yielded cracks to time / and lets leak through the dead white underneath.”

That “barred radiance” is very fine, as is “small lakes of sheen reflect the light.” “Gradations of Black” is an imaginative poetical performance, unfolding a sequence of inspired interpretations in which black abstraction yields vivid representational significance.

Credit: The above photograph of John Updike is by Brigitte Lacombe.

Peter Campbell (April 16, 1937 - October 25, 2011)

This is my tribute to Peter Campbell, who died October 25, 2011. Campbell worked for the London Review of Books from its inception, in 1979, as designer, illustrator, and art reviewer. He was a brilliant contemplator of art. As Mary-Kay Wilmers says, in her tribute to Campbell (“Diary,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2011), his pieces about exhibitions “take you with him into the gallery.” His art writing was, for me, a great source of pleasure. His connection with The New Yorker is non-existent, but I often read him in conjunction with pieces I’d read in the magazine. See, for example, my posts “Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike” (February 7, 2011) and “Werner Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’: 3 Reviews” (June 9, 2011). The origin of my interest in his writing traces back to his review of a Joan Eardley exhibition that appeared in the December 13, 2007, LRB, titled “At the National Gallery of Scotland.” I have a clipping of it here in front of me as I write this. It’s filled with my underlinings. I love descriptions of art. The Eardley piece contains several beauties, including this inspired line: “de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks.” How fine that “bones of an unseen landscape”! The clinching review – the one that made me a devoted follower of his LRB columns – is the one he did on the Tate Modern exhibition “Rothko: The Late Series” (“At Tate Modern,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008). I have that clipping here in front of me, as well. Looking at one of Rothko’s great red-on-maroon Seagram murals, he says, “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” Campbell also had an appreciative eye for items of material culture (e.g., the “bicornual” basket from the rain forests of north-eastern Queensland, which he noted in his piece “At the British Museum,” London Review of Books, June 16, 2011, as follows: “Its sculptural curves are emphasized by the way the strands of cane from which it is made follow swelling contours. It is a wonderful, evolved design”). In 2009, At …, a rich collection of Campbell’s art writings was published. I count it among my favorite books.