Tom Sutcliffe: You can have too much Rothko

Visiting the Mark Rothko show at Tate Modern the other day, I felt there was something odd about the atmosphere of the large room in which the exhibition organisers have hung the famous Seagram Murals – the paintings that were commissioned and painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, before the artist decided he couldn't square the work's aesthetic seriousness with the expense-account audience that would enjoy privileged access to it. Tate Modern already owns a large collection of the works Rothko produced for this commission and has borrowed more – so that it can reconstruct at least one of the putative hangs for this space. And entering the room, I found that it didn't quite deliver the punch of sacred enclosure that quite a lot of writing about Rothko might lead you to expect – and which the Tate's ordinary,... [read full story]