According to an anecdote told by his daughter, Kate Rothko Prizel, who does not vouch for its accuracy, a conflict arose between Mark Rothko and the curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Peter Selz, when the artist had a solo exhibition there in 1961. Rothko, who insisted on reduced lighting, apparently got into the habit of adjusting the electric switches in order to dim the lights whenever he came into the rooms. Selz, as soon as he was informed of the painter's stealth interventions, would turn them back up.
The anecdote seems quite plausible given Rothko's prickly nature and his dissatisfaction is easy to understand, judging by the photographs that remain of the exhibition. Beams of light are sometimes directed straight at the canvases. Others cast inappropriate shadows. And, clearly, the rooms were too narrow for the 54 paintings selected, meaning that they had to be arranged too close together.
The retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is designed to avoid all these mistakes. First of all, the exhibition is compactly arranged. The 115 works are spread over four floors in 10 rooms. Works from the 1930s and 1940s, which were still quite small, are logically placed in the lower gallery, with its lower ceilings. Paintings from the following two decades are housed on the other three floors, whose monumental dimensions match their own. They have all the space they need and, on several occasions, one work stands alone on a wall, thus radiating out even further.
Where there are series of works, they occupy the longest galleries and are composed either according to a chromatic predominance – the ratio of red, pink and white, for example – or because the colored zones are placed in a similar way – three bands of similar widths or the superimposition of two or three quadrangles. This method of categorization aligns with the inherent logic of the work. At several points, Rothko gives himself what is known in music as a "theme" – here a color, there a type of composition – and develops it by modulating variations. This was the case on at least three occasions: in the mid-1950s, with what might be called his "fauve period"; a little later, with the – by contrast, very dark – canvases of Seagram Murals; and, at the end of his life, in the black-and-gray suite of 1969 and 1970. The visual coherence of the rooms is a testament to the coherence of the artist's creation.
A second satisfying element is the heights at which the paintings are hung. Rothko wanted them low, whatever the format. This principle is strictly adhered to so that you are not merely facing a painting, but it's as if you are inside it. This close, almost tactile perception arouses sensations and emotions every time you approach the painted surface. If the word were not so overused today, one might say it's immersion, in a flow or a cloud. Given the intensity of the colors and the sensuality of the red and yellow scales, these sensations are powerful and long-lasting. Hardly any other 20th-century painter has gone so far in the art of absorption, pushed to the point of rapture. It is hardly surprising that, during his travels in Italy, Rothko went to Assisi, Arezzo and Florence each time, to Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico. Nor is it surprising that he wanted to create a chapel, where the viewer is surrounded by canvases.
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