Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Mark Rothko's Seagram's Paintings

The story of how nine paintings commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant ended up at the Tate:

The Rothko murals at Tate Modern are lovely in their oppression, erotic in their cruelty. These are paintings that seem to exist on the skin inside an eyelid. They are what you imagine might be the last lights, the final flickers of colour that register in a mind closing down. Or at the end of the world. "Apocalyptic wallpaper" was a phrase thrown at Rothko's kind of painting as an insult.

I think Apocalyptic Wallpaper would be a great name for a band.

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