Can the Tate Rothkos—just colored rectangles, after all, & originally intended to decorate a restaurant—really be disturbing art?

In 2012, one fellow found the Tate Rothkos sufficiently disturbing to physically attack them. He spent a year and a half in prison as a consequence, the same amount of time it took the Tate Modern to complete the restoration.

Whatever one’s opinion, the Tate Rothkos are certainly epic, despite being as brooding & brutal as the building that now houses them, the chimney of which appears in this photograph, dirty brown & windowless, rising like a malignant tower of Sauron on the South Bank—contrasting, as Sabrina notes, with the pale purity of St. Paul’s on the other side.

Also captured in this panorama is Bronaryre’s “unattractive hodgepodge of oddly-shaped modern buildings” downriver. The limestone structure in the left foreground is Somerset House, and on its flagstaff can be seen a glimpse of the same red-and-gold blazon of the house of Plantagenet that Sabrina scrutinized.