Untitled (Sketch for Harvard Mural)

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.

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 luglio 1959 – 11 ottobre 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.

1962

Pop art: “Are the young artists plotting to kill us all?”

At a 1962 exhibition of pop art Rothko called the pop artists “charlatans and young opportunists” and wondered aloud whether the young artists were plotting to kill them all; looking at Jasper Johns’s flags he remarked that they had worked for years to get rid of all that.

1963

Son born: Christopher Rothko