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Red
has been
getting so much attention, and so we thought that the story of the
paintings would be rather interesting to delve into. John
Logan's
Red,
starring Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko, is a work-play where
paintings are recreated onstage while exploring the very nature of
creativity, the relationship between art and commerce, and the
master/apprentice dynamic.
Red
hinges on the story of the series of paintings called
The
Seagram Murals,
which were commissioned to hang in the Four Seasons restaurant in
the Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram building, but were never
delivered when Rothko (perhaps balking at the idea of his
paintings hanging in such an obviously commercial space) canceled
the agreement, and later donated some of the paintings to the Tate
Museum in London.
John Fischer
of Harpers Magazine, who wrote a memoir about Rothko, and
first met him in 1959, relates that Rothko said to him about the
series: "After I had been at work for some time, I realized
that I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo's walls
in the staircase of the Medicean Library in Florence. He
achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after - he makes the viewers
feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and
windows are bricked up...."
The
Laurentian Library in Florence, or the Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, is really a reading room and a vestibule and is
considered Michelangelo’s architectural Mannerist masterpiece.
The vestibule, with its lovely and magnificent staircase leading
up to the library, is disorienting and dark with its strange blind
windows and the sophisticated and strong reinterpretation of the classical vocabulary of orders and
proportion--the idea of darkness and confusion, the columned
inward-looking somber windows, the sweep of stairs, leading upward into the reading
room which is a place of meditation and learning, of light. Vasari
said of the Library: “...in this stairway, he made such
strange breaks in the design of the steps and he departed in so
many details and so widely from normal practice, that everyone was
astonished.” Michelangelo himself wrote to Vasari that
he had seen the design for the staircase “as if in a dream.”
The Red
Studio, Henri Matisse, 1911, Oil on canvas, MoMA
Rothko’s
paintings recall Michelangelo’s blind windows, passionate in their
intensity of color and simplicity, the window-like shapes of
color-on-color, blacks and reds that perhaps recall the reds of
the houses of Pompeii and the color scheme he is said to have
noted at the Villa of
the Mysteries. Rothko is also known to have been fascinated by
Matisse’s The Red Studio. Whatever the source of the color
red, it is the color we see when our eyes are closed in the sun
(eyelids shut like blind windows), and is also the color of love
and passion and fire.
See:
Red
See the
paintings online:
The
Seagram Murals
The
Charlie Rose interview:
A Look at
John Logan's play Red
Tags:
art architecture theatre museums
london
broadway
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Untitled,
Mark Rothko, 1958, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art
The
Vestibule of the Laurentian Library with its blind windows
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