Red: Paint it black

SINGAPORE — There’s nothing like the story of a tragic artist to brighten up your day.

Director Samantha Scott-Blackhall and her company Blank Space Theatre return to The Esplanade’s The Studios series, jumping from 2012’s Freud’s Last Session to Rothko’s last paintings.

If the former was essentially a debate between Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis about God, John Logan’s award-winning docu-drama Red sees the Abstract Expressionist great Mark Rothko sparring with his apprentice about Art.

We step inside Rothko’s New York studio (completely with reproductions of his huge works, coming all the way from Shenzhen). He’s in the midst of creating what would eventually be called the Seagram Murals, paintings commissioned for the new Four Seasons Restaurant.

“What do you see?” barks Rothko (Daniel Jenkins as a kooky, grumpy uncle with a big nose who flares up when you least expect it). “Red,” shrugs apprentice Ken (Gavin Yap).

Of course it’s not just red. To Rothko, it’s everything — and good luck to anyone who questions him.

Logan’s dense, poetic script packs in a lot. It’s a portrait of an artist, a painting tutorial and an art history lesson all rolled into a lecture masquerading as a stage play. As Rothko and Ken prepare the canvas, move paintings around, you enter the mind of an artist simultaneously cocky and insecure, frequently taking jabs at his dead contemporary Jackson Pollock and fawning over his heroes Caravaggio and Matisse, while dishing out put-downs to his young assistant (who bites back, accusing him of selling out by doing paintings for a restaurant).

But at the heart of it all is, perhaps, the question of legacy. Rothko, for all his bluster, fears irrelevance. He is extremely paranoid about the new kids on the block — the Pop Art revolution of the likes of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Johns — and it stands for. Naturally, he hates it all.

In today’s world of market-savvy, interesting-but-often-safe artists, I have a soft spot for stubborn, old fashioned, irrational artists who reach for the unattainable and often scream “I am not here to make pretty pictures!”. The Rothko in Red (which should basically be the real Rothko as Logan uses many direct quotes) is someone we should perhaps listen to when, sounding defeated, he tells his apprentice to “make something new” — even as he recalls how, when he started, there was no money, no critics, no galleries, no apprentices. (No, ahem, mentorship programmes?)

Of course, there was art after Rothko (and artists who would off themselves as well). But I doubt we’ll have a Jeff Koons play titled Puppy or a Damien Hirst one called Dots.

A small personal anecdote. In Red, Rothko kept mentioning works in Italy that were his inspiration. Well, strangely enough, during a recent trip there, I found that he had come full circle — but not in the way he would have imagined.

I was surrounded by lots and lots of Rothkos not in a Four Seasons Restaurant but in a Hilton hotel — an ugly one near the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport, in the middle of nowhere.

Rothkos literally lined the hotel corridors and were in my room but they were, obviously, not the huge works that glowed and pulsed in the dim light, the ones that evoked something spiritual. Instead, they were facsimiles shrunk to the size of decor. He had been Warhol-ed, the thing he feared the most.

Yes, Rothko’s legacy is assured. But in more ways than one, it comes at a price. As he says in Red, there’s tragedy in every brush stroke.

Red runs until July 13, various times, at The Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets at $28 from Sistic. An “abstract art jam” by HansArt will be held on July 12, 4.30pm, and July 13, 1pm at the Esplanade Theatre Studio Foyer. Tickets at S$25 (S$20 for ticket holders). Tony Godfrey will be giving a talk about Mark Rothko on July 13, 5pm, at the library@esplanade. Free admission. For more details on The Studios, visit http://www.thestudios.com.sg/