Untitled (Seagram Mural sketch)

1950s

The poet Stanley Kunitz

The critic Dore Ashton saw Rothko’s acquaintance with the poet Stanley Kunitz as a significant bond of these years, their conversations feeding Rothko’s enterprise; Kunitz saw him as a primitive and a shaman who finds the magic formula.

November 1958

The Pratt Institute talk: a “recipe” for a painting

In November 1958 Rothko spoke at the Pratt Institute, unusually treating art as a trade and listing the ingredients of a painting: a preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit and play, the ephemeral, and ten per cent hope to make the tragic more endurable.

after June 1959

Walks away from the Four Seasons: the advance is returned

Back in New York Rothko visited the nearly completed restaurant, found its atmosphere pretentious and unsuited to his paintings, refused to go on and returned his cash advance to Seagram. He kept the paintings in storage until 1968; the series was later split between the Tate, the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

June 1959

Europe: the Laurentian Library, Pompeii, Turner

In June 1959 Rothko and his family went to Europe: Rome, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, then Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, where he studied Turner’s watercolours. On the ship he told the journalist John Fischer that he wanted his murals to ruin the appetite of everyone who ate in that room, and in Florence he found the feeling of a walled-in room he was after in the vestibule of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library.

11 July 1959 – 11 October 1959

Exhibition: Documenta II

1961

The retrospective at MoMA

In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Rothko’s work, to considerable commercial and critical success, though the art world was already turning its attention to pop art.