by Jon Lackman | 14 December 2009 | Modern
Novelist, screenwriter and art-world hoaxer William Boyd discusses a new play about Mark Rothko:
Like many celebrated artists of his generation – the postwar American abstract expressionists, the so-called New York School – Rothko was at best a mediocre painter, and would have been judged as one, until he found his magic formula. Among his number one can cite similar examples of famous artists who couldn’t really draw: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and, the most graphically inept of all, Jackson Pollock. It seems to me no accident that all these artists sought refuge in abstraction where their signal inadequacies in the world of figuration would be no impediment. The move was canny and acclaimed – these abstract artists achieved great renown and concomitant wealth. But did it bring aesthetic satisfaction – or, to put it more prosaically: did it make them happy?
This question is at the centre of a fascinating new play, Red, just opened at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a bravura two-hander – all the action revolves around increasingly adversarial conversations between Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his assistant (Eddie Redmayne) during a two-year period at the end of the 1950s, when Rothko was working on a highly paid commission to provide a series of murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building.
