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.
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.
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 lipca 1959 – 11 października 1959
Exhibition: Documenta II