20th October 2024 - Mark Rothko & That Commission

I’ve always subscribed to the notion that people go to restaurants to eat, they go to libraries to read and they go to art galleries to see the art.  So what possessed the artist Mark Rothko to accept the commission to populate the walls of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York with his paintings is beyond me.  Yes, he was offered a handsome fee but the Seagram Building represented the epitome of high capitalism, whilst Rothko was a different creature all together. 

Rothko was 55 and at the height career when he accepted the commission in 1958.  Personally, I would have leapt at the opportunity, taken the money and not give a damn about what the wealthy patrons thought of my work - assuming they would bother to look up from their caviar.  But Rothko was a Russian Jew who had fled persecution in his homeland with his family, a tortured soul who thought long and hard about accepting it.

He thought art could change the world, so he really had to accept the Seagram commission, massive though it was.  He was a tragic artist who wanted people to break down and cry in front of his paintings, so one has to wonder how many of the patrons at the Four Seasons would have been on the same wavelength.  It had take Rothko 30 years to find himself as an artist, a long hard struggle.

As he was finalizing work on the commission, he began having misgivings about the whole project which was exhausting him.  He reportedly began to rail against the “sons of bitches” who would be dining beneath his paintings and hoped they would ruin their appetites.  He had come up with some emotionally stirring work aimed solely at the senses, but for a venue where the rich and famous would be wining and dining to the wee small hours - you can see the conflict.  A passionate, tragic artist had accepted the ultimate exercise in interior decoration. 

After having a meal with his wife at the opening of the Four Seasons, Rothko decided the restaurant would not be getting his 30 mural sized paintings and he handed the money back.  The paintings are scattered at various locations, including in the collection of Rothko’s children. 

22nd September 2024

Warning - this post amounts to a whinge about our hallowed National Gallery of Victoria.  So what do you get when spending $100 on a ‘members only’ tour at the NGV?  In the past we were offered fold-up seats, but not this time.  Instead, we were expected to stand for over 1 1/2 hours listening to the curators in spaces, some of which were poorly ventilated.   

It wasn’t long before some of us discretely went off for a wander because our legs demanded it whilst others begged the gallery attendants for seats.  Do you really need a MFA to fathom this out?  At one point, a friend of mine was sitting on the floor. 

The first of the curators to speak was terrible.  Her delivery was punctuated with ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and she kept repeating herself.  It’s one thing to have a massive storehouse of knowledge, it’s quite another to relate it in an engaging manner.  The second spent his time standing in front of Salvador Dali’s Mae West sofa - Why?  Kitsch is kitsch. 

The third was given little time to discuss some interesting work by the famous American architect Frank Lloyd-Wright due to the first two having gone overtime.  As fully paid up members, we deserve something better and I will be emailing the NGV to that effect.  The aforementioned $100 includes the book pictured below.  I have only skimmed over it so far but if I find any ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ in it, I will be hurling it out of the upstairs window.

PS;  Wandering around a large, near empty gallery in semi darkness can be an eerie experience. I wish I could arrange this again, but not for $100.

7th September 2024

Clive James has been described as a writer, poet, lyricist, linguist, comedian, TV critic and star and cultural commentator.  His was a life lived to the full, but when he was interviewed by Kerry O’Brien in 2013, it was clear that not only was he very ill, but he had some regrets as well. 

He had been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema and given the state he was in at the time of the interview, it seems remarkable that he lived for another 6 years until the age of 80.  He continued to work right up to his death, but was confined to the UK due to his treatments.  Not being able to return to Australia weighed heavily on him in his final years.

Rather than focus on the notion that he was world weary and had seen it all, James said that he discovered a clarity of mind and an ability to concentrate on the essentials once he became ill.  He was paying the ultimate price for years of chain smoking.

In March 2013, James wrote a poem called Holding Court which included the lines “you have no future so forget the past, think less of love and all that you have lost, cherish the prison of your waning days, let this be no occasion for despair, remember liberty and what it cost.”  His writing had always been the central thread of his life and it really amounted to a lifetime of his own reflections. 

But this obsession made him a selfish person (by his own admission) and hard to live with.  There was a conflict between his passion for writing and his responsibilities as a father and husband.  At this point in the interview, I was remembering his various “postcard” writings and TV shows and this had me wondering how someone could combine a globe trotting existence with family.  There were suggestions of womanizing which he didn’t want to expand on.  But he believed that he did a better job of protecting his family from the glare of publicity than he was given credit for. 

Born in Sydney in 1939, James left for England in 1961 but Sydney never left him, to the extent that his early experiences did inform much of his writing.  He was raised by his mother on the widows pension after his father (who he never knew) died in a plane crash on the way home after being released from a Japanese POW camp at the end of WW2.  He was with his mother when she received the telegram, and after that he formed the opinion that there were no guarantees about life - that nothing was “tied down”.  He believed (at the age of 6) that he needed to live the productive life that his parents would have lived had his father returned. 

He sailed for England and after picking up a few odd jobs, eventually studied at Cambridge during which time he developed a passion for drama and cultural journalism.  After a few years working at Fleet Street, James made the transition to television.  His daughter once wrote that her father’s TV persona didn’t seem to be him.  To her, he is someone who thinks, reads and writes poetry.  When O'Brien puts this to James, he responds by quoting John Updike “fame is a mask that eats the face”. 

A day of reckoning came to James at the age of 55 when he visited his father’s grave in Hong Kong.  He wrote a poem about it ‘Son Of A Soldier’ referencing the hurt he had done to those he loved and the hurt that was done to him “in the beginning”.  He felt that circumstances made him cold of heart and now he was facing the truth about life.  It seems that he was exposing his vulnerabilities in his writing. 

James admitted that he was discontented with ordinary life and he didn’t see this as a virtue.  He had a marriage that was meant to be his anchor, but he wasn’t “built” for it and instead wanted to be everywhere and do everything.  This stemmed from a hunger, the origins of which he couldn’t identify.

He spoke very highly of his wife Prue and the role she played in his career as a writer, although at the time of the interview they were separated but still in regular contact. 

It’s a reflection of James’ multi faceted persona, that a critic once described him as a great bunch of guys.

4th August 2024

One of the more striking sculpture exhibitions that I’ve seen lately was that by the Georgian born artist who now resides in Melbourne, Nina Sanadze at the NGV Australia. Her exhibition challenges the notion of permanence in sculpture, as well as the times they are meant to represent.

One of Sanadze’s inspirations was the Soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze who died in 1980 when she was 4. Sanadze returned to Georgia in 2018 and discovered that Topuridze’s public sculptures had been destroyed, but his family had protected other examples of his work and she had them shipped to Melbourne.

Some of those rescued pieces form part of the exhibition. Other pieces in the exhibition make reference to Soviet troops entering Tbilisi in 1989 to quell an independence movement. She could no longer attend school and spent many hours alone at home.

28th July 2024

I visited a somewhat quirky but very thought provoking exhibition by Dale Cox held at Australian Galleries in Collingwood last week. Titled “Take Me With You”, the exhibition was a commentary on the relationship between our commoditised consumer society and the natural world.

Cox painted beautiful outback scenes in acrylics using gas bottles, fire extinguishers, aluminium cans are timber panels.

Some of his paintings depict enormous capsules with outback scenes painted on them. The message seems to be that instead of drugs and sugar hits, what we really need is to reconnect with nature.