Mark Rothko was an American painter, born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, in the Russian Empire, who died in 1970 in his New York studio. He is known for huge canvases of two or three soft-edged rectangles of color that seem to float, and for the viewers who cry in front of them. He also walked away from the biggest commission of his life, a set of murals for a Manhattan restaurant.
He said the tears were the point. What he wanted to put into those rectangles, he said, was tragedy, ecstasy and doom.
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None of that was meant for a restaurant. In 1958 Rothko accepted a commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons, the dining room of the Seagram Building in New York, for a fee of 35,000 dollars. He set to work and painted about 30 canvases in deep maroon and black.
He never hung one of them there. He called off the contract, agreed to return the whole 35,000 dollars, and kept the paintings.
Then he gave some of them away. Nine of the Seagram canvases crossed the Atlantic to the Tate in London, and they reached the museum in February 1970, the month Rothko died. A painter who had been hired to decorate a room for the rich had decided, in the end, who his pictures were for.
What You'll Discover
Who Rothko was before the rectangles.
What he said the paintings were for.
What changed his mind about the restaurant.
What happened to his Harvard murals.
What he painted for a chapel.
What happened to his paintings after his death.