I don’t like audio head-sets at exhibitions. I understand the point of them: optional education - if a person wants information it should be available without being forced on them as would writing on the wall or a loud tour party guide. Occasionally some are frustrated by their lack of answers, but that is quite correctly what they should not provide. My problem is not with the quite justifiable reasons for them, but with their effect - they let people turn away from their own nervous subjective reactions into the safety of someone else’s attempt at objectivity.

There is a quite different head set involved in looking at Mark Rothko’s late works. Faced with the reknown and critical background of the pieces, the typical newcomer searches for reasons and figurative meaning in the paintings. Tate’s audio guide engages this in cinematic fashion in room 2: ‘I saw a man looking into the canvas as if he was searching for something, like he has dropped his coat into it or he was looking for the exit in there,’ says a friend of the artist, while mood music plays and a video pans around a man looking at the painting. Incredibly, it is still a point that needs making: viewing a Rothko is an experience and not a exercise in discovery - learning about it almost defeats the point.

This experience is inescapable amidst the headliner Seagram Murals in the low-lit room 3, where rough edged rectangles of oranges, dark reds and maroons saturate the canvases and approach the eye in layers. The huge space is rendered intimate and you find yourself drawn towards the large pieces, the brightest oranges moving towards you and the darker points sitting back. Before long you could find yourself sitting in front of them for a great deal of time.

The prominence of these pieces in the exhibition and the publicity surrounding it has somewhat covered over the other sets on show. Next round is the excellent black-form set painted for what is now known as The Rothko Chapel, marred slightly by spot lighting reflecting off the surface - ironic since Rothko when alive was noted for the exigencies he made to galleries about exhibition lighting. The sets that bring the sharpest emotional contrast to the Seagram Murals, however, are the brown and grey and black and grey sets on paper. Produced during the last couple of years before his suicide in 1970, their much discussed white borders and thinner, bleaker colours alienate the viewer. The stark contrast of exclusion to the intimacy in room 3 will effect even the biggest sceptics of the impact of Rothko’s work.

“If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing again,” as Rothko once said, and so it is a little disappointing that such a great show, and one that would so inevitably benefit from revisits costs £12.50 a pop. Is the Tate not a registered charity? Of course members enter for free - perhaps this is the direction they are herding people with such high prices.

Rothko will show at the Tate Modern until 1 February, 2009. Opening hours are Sunday to Thursday, 10.00–18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15). Go here for more details.

DJE

image Untitled 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998

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