Broadcaster and author Simon Schama gives us his perspectives on Mark Rothko. ‘Rothko didn’t much care to be called an abstract artist; formalism smelled altogether too much of the decorative and he evidently had bigger fish to fry, especially in The Four Seasons commission. Why did the painter who has been taken to be the exemplary modernist, reach so persistently towards the past: primordial, archaic, classical? And do the Seagram paintings constitute the monumental temple of meditation he yearned to create?’.
