Untitled (Study for Seagram Murals)

1949–1956

Large vertical canvases: being “inside” the picture

For seven years Rothko painted in oil only on large vertical canvases so that the viewer would feel “enveloped within” the painting. Critics saw this as compensating for a lack of substance; he replied that he painted large because he wanted to be intimate, and advised viewers to stand as close as eighteen inches away.

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.