Rothko’s Black on Maroon Vandalism
So excited to talk about Rothko this week. He is hands down one of my all-time favourite artists, I love him. I am also enraged that someone vandalized this very classic piece, they didn’t even target it for any reason it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time :( let’s discuss.
Black on Maroon
Of course, you know I’ll give y’all the context. Rothko painted this series of three canvasses (one of which is the Black on Maroon that we’ll be discussing) from 1958-1959 for The Four Seasons Restaurant in NYC. Pretty swanky commission for any artist! However, when he was finished with the pieces he ended up withholding them from The Four Seasons saying that he didn’t want his art to be the backdrop to the eating of the privileged (we stan a progressive king). He held onto the trio until 1965 he suggested giving them as a gift to The Tate Gallery in London. The deal was finalized in 1969 and in 1970 on the day the crates were being unpacked in London a cable was received from New York informing them that Rothko had been found dead in his studio. That has nothing to do with this case but definitely a spooky/sad coincidence.
In terms of the pieces themselves, they are HUGE. Each canvas is an almost 9-foot square painted in sombre tones of, you guessed it, maroon and black.
Vandalism
On October 7, 2012, Black on Maroon is hanging in its gallery, minding its own business when it is brutally and abruptly attacked with a black permanent marker. Wlodzimierz Umaniec, the vandal had walked into the Tate with the intent to vandalize any painting he could get his hands on and it just so happened that it ended up being a Rothko. Weirdly, later on, Umaniec claimed that he was torn up about it because Rothko was one of his favourite artists however this is extremely sus to me.
Anyways, back to the main event. Umaniec walked in with a thick permanent marker and wrote his name, the number 12 and “a potential piece of yellowism” on the bottom right corner of the canvas (I will come back to what the heck yellowism is in a minute). Because the canvas didn’t have any kind of protective clear coating or varnish on it the wound was deep (should have taken a note from The Night Watch and it’s thick varnish). The ink seeped right through all layers of paint and straight through the canvas as well. Conservationists reported being devastated when they saw the damage and they were fearing that there might be nothing they could do to restore the painting.
The repair process was extensive. They started with making a replica painting with replica graffiti and testing out different solvents to see if anything could remove the ink but leave the painting unharmed, this process took them about 18 months but eventually, they found something that allowed them to remove the ink from the painting with minimal damage to the work itself. Thank goodness. It was put back on display at The Tate in 2014, the sad thing is that even though the damage from the marker is now gone from the top layer of the painting and is invisible to the human eye they’ll never be able to remove it from the deeper layers of paint or the canvas. Even still, I give this one a 10/10 just for the painstaking research, good work team!
Here’s one more photo so you can appreciate fully how soothing (I think) this room full of Rothkos is at the Tate.
Why Did This Happen?
So yeah, like you I am also like wtf is going on here. Who is this person? Why is he going around tagging paintings? And what the HECK is yellowism?? Obviously, I don’t have all the answer but I do have some!
So all of these questions kind of flow into each other, the guy, Wlodzimierz Umaniec is a Polish guy who came to England and linked up with another guy named Marcin Łodyga to form this “art movement” (in quotations because I am saying that with the MOST sarcasm) called Yellowism. I have read so much about it and I still don’t really get it but from what I can gather it’s a form of appropriation art where, when you tag something, it becomes part of the movement and body of work. Then all of these yellowism “pieces” are all flattened to be on the same level. So, for example, you could tag a piece of concrete or a scrap of garbage outside and it would be considered art the same way that Black on Maroon was now considered art because they’re both part of the movement. I know, I know, it still doesn’t make the most sense but this is the clearest explanation I could write for you.
So basically Umaniec vandalized this priceless and, in my opinion, amazing, iconic, gorgeous work of art to promote this weird, irrelevant art movement that he made up.
You will be very pleased to note that this was not a difficult crime for the police to investigate and Umaniec was arrested the day after the incident. He ended up being charged with vandalism and was sentenced to two years in jail (YAY).
Once he was released he issued an apology saying “Back in 2012 I made a mistake. I wanted to change the art world by introducing Yellowism - an autonomous phenomenon in contemporary visual culture - to the people. But defacing Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon at the Tate Modern was not the right way of going about it” (Umaniec, 2014). And like, sure, that’s all well and good but then he follows it up with, “my actions were wrong because they served not only to heap ridicule on myself, but also to turn the public against Yellowism” (Umaniec, 2014). UGH this is such a non-apology and I hate to see it. There are some good parts of the apology as well that sound sincere but since when is it cool to deface art that someone else has made so that you can take weird credit for it?? How ~fragile~ is your ego, man?
Works Cited
Halperin, Julia. “WTF is Yellowism? A Guide to the Obscure Movement Behind the Tate Rothko Attack”. Huff Post. 2012. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wtf-is-yellowism-a-guide-_b_1958396#:~:text=It's%20not%20an%20artistic%20movement,not%20reality%2C%20it's%20just%20Yellowism.&text=If%20the%20founders%20of%20Yellowism,becomes%20part%20of%20the%20movement.
“Mark Rothko Work Goes Back on Display After Vandalism”. BBC News. 2014. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-27371270
Umaniec, Wlodzimierz. “I Regret Vandalizing a Rothko, But I Remain Committed to Yellowism”. The Guardian. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/15/vandalising-rothko-yellowism-black-on-maroon-tate-modern
Barker, Rachel and Bronwyn Ormsby. “Conserving Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon 1958: The Construction of a ‘Representative Sample’ and the Removal of Grafitti Ink”. Tate Papers. 2015. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/23/conserving-mark-rothkos-black-on-maroon-1958-the-construction-of-a-representative-sample-and-the-removal-of-graffiti-ink