What's it all about Rothko?

Somewhere on planet Earth there are people who don’t like Rothko — but I’ve never met them. His late abstract paintings, the subject of this exhibition, are like the brighter earlier works, only darker, more depressing, morose, nay macabre, possibly cynical, eventually suicidal, some say, and mostly purple, brown and black. Hey, what’s not to like?

But although everyone I’ve ever met loves Rothko, no one has come up with a convincing reason why. From the moment he became famous in the Fifties, critics, collectors, curators and my mother alike have burbled away about the intensity of his colours and some kind of intangible spiritual experience. In the past I have sounded no more coherent than them, but I walked determinedly into the Tate’s new Rothko show ever hopeful that at last I might find the answer to one of art’s greatest mysteries: why is Rothko so great?

The Seagrams are the beginning and the centrepiece of this exhibition, which tracks the last 12 years of Rothko’s career, but they are also part of the Tate’s permanent collection. So a word of warning: Tate Modern has been a little creative in its packaging of this show. This isn’t quite a new exhibition, rather it’s an expanded version of the Tate’s famous permanent Rothko room, which most Londoners will already be very familiar with. Naughtier still, the catalogue proclaims "Rothko" proudly on the front and spine, as if this were a sexy autobiographical blockbuster show like the Bacon at Tate Britain. It’s only when you open it up and closely inspect the title page that you read in really small print: "The Late Series". If these guys were selling finance, they’d be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Still, it looks marvellous. This is the Seagram Murals: The Director’s Cut. Instead of the muted grey walls of the Tate’s Rothko room, the pictures have been rehung in a long oblong space and combined with a few more of the series from museums in Washington and Sakura in Japan. The lighting is warmly dingy, as Rothko requested. The glowing maroons and sulphurous oranges, the shadowy shapes of frames and slits like windows, the veils of dark hues behind which the brighter colours glow make you feel as if you are in a shadowy ancient temple, where distant torches burn and bright sunlight is hidden by veils. In the side rooms there are preparatory drawings and a room full of scientific photographs of Rothko’s paintings which explain how the Seagram Murals were painted, and three other late series, which seem to tell a story of the artist’s growing distress, like the last act of King Lear.

In these, the vision of the genius becomes ever grimmer. The luscious hovering lozenges of foggy colour of the murals give way to new, sharper textures of works on paper, in grey, brown and black. Here, instead of being absorbed softly into the canvas, the colour sits chalkily on top, sometimes like a slim layer of dried mud. The thin paint is scratched on, and you can see the trace of every hair from the brush. This was an age in which artists explored textures as an aesthetic in itself. There were Pollock’s drips, Jasper Johns’s cross-hatching and sheets of thick felt and raw rusting steel from other artists. But these works are not nearly as big or important as the Seagram pictures themselves.

If the exhibition is a sort of collector’s edition DVD, the extras make it worth it. The room of ultraviolet and infrared photographs of details of Rothko’s paintings are a revelation. The Tate’s conservation boffins have spent two years examining Rothko’s paintings and have found the secret ingredients in the beetroot and tomato soup of the Seagrams. Rothko used raw canvases with thick fibres, and therefore with rough instead of the usual smooth surfaces. He primed them unusually with a glue solution and on top of that he painted in thin layers of colour, so that one hue could be seen underneath another, deliberately "blurring" the edges of his rectangles with thin feathery brushstrokes. The artist worked methodically with degrees of transparency, and with the partially concealed and partially revealed. The scientific photos are as beautiful in themselves as one of Rothko’s pictures, and if the Tate’s curators were as entrepreneurial as they are erudite, they would be selling them in a limited edition. As it is, another conceptual artist will have to pick up the baton and make a series of scientific photos of "spiritual" paintings.

I have another gripe: nowadays I am used to the contemporary art bubble souring my experience of art, and this was no exception. With Bacon at Tate Britain and Rothko at Tate Modern, the Tate is putting on shows of the two most expensive post-war artists of the moment. Last year Roman Abramovich bought a Bacon triptych for $86 million, while the Qatari royal family picked up a legendary Rothko White Centre for $72 million. So this is how it works: we hand over all our money to them to buy oil and gas, then they spend it on really expensive works of art, then we hold big exhibitions of works by the same artists in the most prestigious museums we’ve got, partly funded by our taxes. That sounds like a good deal, right? Abramovich’s Bacon is even in the Tate show. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Tate shouldn’t do shows like this, but they demonstrate that all those pious claims by museum curators that the art market and art are two separate entities are baloney.

Rothko, like most fabulously successful artists, had nothing good to say about the modern speculative art market which grew up around him and in which he was one of the strongest currencies. He said he was "only interested in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." Today, all that morbid, spiritual talk has become unfashionable and in the exhibition catalogue the curators do their best to come up with a new set of rational explanations for the Rothko mystery. They argue that Rothko’s palette got darker not because he was depressed but because he was stung by criticisms that his brighter work from the earlier Fifties was decorative.

At the time Rothko was labelled an abstract expressionist, with his deep colours and angst-ridden themes, but from today’s perspective he looks as much of a minimalist. The simple, if blurred geometry of his compositions, his layered style and his deliberate repetitiveness, look forward to Donald Judd and Carl Andre. And as well as anticipating the minimalists in his early work, he came to be influenced by them — the palette of his late pictures was not driven by a desire to create spiritual truths but were influenced by the sombre hues of other contemporaries.

It’s a good effort in terms of art historical revisionism but methinks they doth protest too much. Instead of portraying what one contemporary collector called "the threshold of the divine", the pictures, the curators say, give us Time. It plays a fundamental part in our experience of his work, because as you look at the paintings, different details and qualities emerge. Maybe, Mr Curator, but it takes time to look at any decent picture, doesn’t it?