Rothko revealed: Christopher Rothko shares troubled memories of his father Mark What do you do when your father kills himself and his paintings become embroiled in the biggest art scandal of the decade? Best ask Mark Rothko's son... By Clare Dwyer Hogg
Sunday, 21 September 2008
enlarge  The tapas restaurant that Christopher Rothko has chosen for our interview is on New York's Upper West Side, with tables that spill on to the street. It is very good, and much fancier than anywhere his late father Mark – the celebrated avant-garde painter whose abstract expressionism changed the face of art – would have dined for most of his life. "People imagine my father had a glamorous existence, but he lived mainly in slums," Christopher says, as he settles into his chair. Mark Rothko's best-known paintings now sell for tens of millions of pounds, but during the Great Depression he lived hand-to-mouth, and until the last two decades of his life – which he ended with a razor blade, in his studio, early one morning in 1970 when Christopher was six – was largely unrecognised and unsupported by the art establishment. The artist's 45-year-old son is a psychologist, but has for the past eight years looked after the Rothko Family Collection and Archive with his older sister, Kate. Rothko's prolific body of work, mostly produced before people began to think of him as an artist of note, was often done at night, after a day of teaching, and at weekends. Part of the tragedy of his career was that he spent a lifetime struggling for recognition, then struggled to deal with it when he achieved it. "I don't think he ever fully came to grips with it," Christopher smiles. "As soon as he became successful he began to suspect it, that maybe the painting was too easy because so many people liked it." An episode in his career that epitomises Rothko's ambivalence about success is the Seagram murals. In 1958, Rothko was asked to supply wall paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in its opulent new building in New York. He agreed. Yet, by 1960, he returned the portion of the $35,000 fee that had been paid to him, and kept the murals. Later, the artist is reported to have said that he accepted the assignment with "malicious intent", and hoped to paint something that would "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room". (Four of the 40 he completed for the commission have hung in the Tate's galleries since he donated them in 1965, and now form the centrepieces of Tate Modern's forthcoming exhibition.) Rothko, it seems, was uncomfortable with the restaurant's ostentation. "I think he deceived himself about what that restaurant was going to be about," Christopher says. "I think he desperately wanted to do a major public work ... but once he saw the reality that had always been whispering to him, he couldn't…

 London Ponders Its Future      

  Secrets of the brain: The grey matter that makes us who we are From shyness and moral judgement to creativity and sexual preference, a fascinating new book shows how our personalities and human traits are written on our brains. Jeremy Laurance reports  
Does size matter?  The brain is our most complex but least understood organ. We can name its parts but our knowledge of what each part does, or how, is rudimentary. In The Brain Book, journalist Rita Carter has assembled what is known about the nerve centre of each individual and explains with the aid of images and graphics its structure, function and disorders. The moral brain When rail worker Phineas Gage blew a hole in the front of his brain while tampering with explosives in 1848, he provided one of the earliest insights into how the organ worked. The explosion drove a rod through his cheek and out through the top of his head, causing him to lose the sight of his left eye but, remarkably, little other damage. However, his personality changed dramatically and from being a conscientious, polite and thoughtful man, he became rude, reckless and socially irresponsible. Damage to several areas of the brain involved in feeling and thinking can affect moral judgement. Related articles By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain...  Belief and superstition  A complex interplay of genes, culture and upbringing contribute to people's belief systems, which provide a framework for their experience. But certain aspects may directly reflect brain activity. Some scientists have suggested that supernatural experiences may be the result of disturbances in the brain. The feelings of ecstasy that accompany them have been attributed to tiny seizures in the temporal lobes. Temporal lobe disturbance has also been associated with the sense of an invisible presence that people who claim to have seen ghosts often report. Out-of-the-body experiences have been linked to reduced activity in the parietal lobes, which normally maintain a stable sense of space and time. Creativity  There is a striking difference in the brains of musicians who play from a score in front of them and those who improvise. Brain imaging studies have shown that the frontal lobes are activated when musicians are reading the notes but turn off in improvisation, allowing ideas to "float". Research suggests that this reflects wider creative processes. When the brain relaxes out of sharp attentiveness, shown by tightly-compressed gamma waves on the EEG, into its "idling" mode, marked by slow alpha waves, that is when new ideas tend to occur. Stimuli that might otherwise be ignored are allowed to enter awareness and can resonate with thoughts, memories and existing knowledge. Sex differences  Brains are as individual to people as faces. But there are broad differences between the sexes, and between differing sexual orientations. The corpus callosum, which links the two sides of the brain, is better developed in women than men. It has been suggested this is why women are…

 Obama grows weary of the global stageRather than risk a one-term presidency with more failures than victories, he has put foreign goals aside to focus on the domestic Olivia Hampton guardian.co.uk, Saturday 6 March 2010 18.00 GMT Article historyWeeks and months of non-stop mudslinging over healthcare have taken their toll on President Obama and placed his foreign policy agenda on the back burner.An anxious world is asking what has become of all Obama's promises to solve the thorniest and most entrenched problems, from the Middle East conflict to closing the internationally reviled Guantánamo prison camp and halting Iran's nuclear defiance. As the flood of words dissipates with little concrete change to show, hope has faded, leaving disillusionment in its place.Nowhere is this more true than in the Middle East. Arab capitals were buoyed when Obama initially dared confront Israel over settlements. But when pressure mounted in Washington and around the country against harming US relations with Israel, the president quickly backed down and made amends – somewhat – with hawkish Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.With his poll ratings slipping, Americans still rattled by their thinning wallets and worried about a possible Republican revival in crucial mid-term elections, Obama the bold, the daring, has adopted a more populist tone and become more risk averse than ever before.More than a year since he was swept to office riding on waves of hope from a tired people, Obama has angered and frustrated his most liberal and most conservative supporters by bowing to internal political pressures. He is now reportedly on the verge of yet another about-face, this time reneging on his decision to try the 9/11 suspects in federal criminal courts and bringing them instead before Bush-era military commissions.

After months of shuttle diplomacy from secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington's top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, the Palestinians and the Israelis appear close to resuming long-stalled negotiations, albeit indirect ones brokered by the US.

The Palestinians, who have long insisted that any conditions be predicated on a return to pre-1967 borders, had dragged their feet for over a year in part because they lacked the political cover from key regional powerbrokers Egypt and Saudi Arabia. With the Arab League now giving its blessing to indirect talks, the onus is now on Washington to prove it can play a vital role as honest broker and realise a peace deal that has eluded Obama's predecessors. But the path is riddled with landmines, and last-minute setbacks can be expected at every turn.Obama may have extended his hand to Tehran, but the Islamic Republic has yet to unclench its fist and halt uranium enrichment. At best, the outreach has managed to give him political cover to push for slapping a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran for its continued defiance over its suspect nuclear programme.…

 Bam's butt on the line for CorzineJon Corzine isn't the only Democrat whose political neck is on the line in the too-close-to-call governor's race in New Jersey. President Obama, who made his third trip to the Garden State yesterday to stump with Corzine, has invested so much...