National Gallery of Art - Mark Rothko: Seagram Murals Mark Rothko: Seagram Murals December 6, 2011–July 22, 2012 This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery. Please follow the links below for related online resources or visit our current exhibitions schedule. Related Resources In the Tower: Mark Rothko Exhibition Brochure Modern and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture In June 1958, Mark Rothko accepted a commission to decorate a dining room in the Four Seasons restaurant of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a new modernist skyscraper by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Departing from his wonted format of floating rectangles in glowing colors, Rothko produced wine-dark paintings with ambiguous portal shapes evoking what he called a "closed space." From the fall of 1958 into 1959 he was completely absorbed, making more than thirty even though the room only offered places for seven. At the same time, he became increasingly doubtful that a luxury restaurant with its wealthy patrons was the appropriate venue for his art.

He withdrew, canceling what would have been his first painted environment—a "place," as he ambitiously said, rather than just a group of paintings. He did, however, complete commissions for a room at Harvard University and a chapel in Houston before his death in 1970. In 1985 and 1986, the National Gallery of Art received a vast gift of works from the Mark Rothko Foundation, including several paintings deriving from the so-called Seagram Mural project. The installation of three of these in the Concourse galleries of the East Building is timed to coincide with the presentation of John Logan's play Red at Arena Stage (January 20 to March 4), which dramatizes Rothko's struggle with the commission. Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art. Schedule: National Gallery of Art, December 6, 2011–July 22, 2012 Mark Rothko - The Seagram Murals -Tate Modern - galleryIntell More Articles by This Author “Abstract art never interested me; I always painted realistically.

My present paintings are realistic.” – Mark Rothko One of the advantages of living in New York City is the access to the vast cultural resources the city has to offer: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), with its remarkable collection of 20th century art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Neue Galerie, the Guggenheim Museum are always here to inspire and feed our souls. It is in New York that I first discovered Rothko’s “classic paintings” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and began my journey towards understanding abstraction. The serene simplicity of Rothko’s forms still overwhelms me as I consider all their implications and depth. The certainty, with which his soft color forms with their indistinct, blurred edges float one above the other, having found their predetermined space on the vast canvas, makes one accept his vision without ever questioning a single gesture. There is a sense of balance and harmony to every element in his work: every brushstroke has to be there and nowhere else, and it has to have the very same opacity or transparency and not a touch more. He arrived at this deductive structure, empty of all direct references to a distinct human form, after years of exploring figurative compositions.

A series of figurative works later known as the “Subway Series” was probably his most complete bodyof work featuring recognizable objects. The converging lines of the subway platforms and the isolated figures, quietly floating upon them were soon reduced to a symbol and then further distilled to a point of universal recognition – a simple suspended color form. The scale also changed. Rothko’s canvases expanded to contain the energy of his new language. Through this transformation, however, he managed to retain the intimacy of a whispered conversation between his work and the viewer. Works from the first decade of his “classical” period were full of luminous, vibrant, multi-layered bands, advancing and retreating with a bold sense of presence and intention, but Rothko painted them as stand alone statements. Each painting was a finished sentence, containing within it a beginning and an end. The Seagram commission that came to Rothko in the spring of 1958 changed the previous paradigm and allowed Rothko to formulate a new platform upon which he could now construct his new visual lexicon. The commission called for a series of large-scale canvases to be installed at the new Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson building on Park Avenue in New York.

The space was more specifically the much-anticipated The Four Seasons restaurant where the Rothko canvases were to hang in the main dining room. He accepted the commission and rented a brand new studio space that closely matched the dimensions of the main dining room. There he positioned the canvases as they were to be installed in the Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko conceived the series in a way that allowed each painting to be created relative to one another – each canvas was a continuation of the previous composition and together they formed one single emotion, one single conversation, and one single sense of space. With his murals Rothko created a unique controlled environment where all the work acted as a single dominating force with the viewer now subject to the space. Prompted by the wish to evade the decorative references made to his earlier work, Rothko now employed a deeper, more somber palette. The vibrant yellows and blues were replaced by the deeper and more emotionally mature plums, deep reds and heavier blues. No longer did we see the energetic combinations of oranges, yellows and whites.

Now the mood of his palette was far more contemplative and reflective, more like a light that’s fading away, receding into the distance, away from the viewer – the bright flashes of color dimming with the onset of dusk. The Seagram Murals – in the end Rothko created 30 of them – seemed to be Rothko’s own exercise in the permutation of the brilliant reds, deep browns and rich blacks. He meticulously explored the balance and the weight of each color in relation to the shape through which it was communicated. The bold, yet feathered horizontal bands in several of the murals, a new direction taken by Rothko for this commission, create a weighted tension between the foreground and the background. His vertical and horizontal “outlines”, almost architectural in origin and form, direct the viewer to address the work in a direct and focused state of mind. Rothko reinforced the architectural structure of his new paintings by stating that these “are not paintings”; instead he proclaimed, “I have made a place.” Rothko also created long horizontal paintings, quite unusual proportions considering his previous compositions, but well suited for the space for which they were intended.

(See the featured image above) The now famous story of the Seagram Murals tells us that Rothko cancelled the commission (the passionate telephone conversation between Mark Rothko and Phillip Johnson was masterfully depicted in Jon Logan’s magnificent play “Red” staged on Broadway in 2010, where the theater smelled of linseed oil and turpentine) and returned the advance because he grew increasingly agitated at the idea that his paintings, would hang as simple wall decorations in the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan while the rich patrons spent “obscene amounts of money” and paid no attention to his work. Rothko was even quoted as saying: “I accepted this assignment with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”** In the end, the series of murals came to be referred to by the name of its original client – The Seagram corporation and are still displayed under this name in various exhibitions. The most famous group of the Seagram Murals is in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern in London. The museum received these paintings in 1969 as a gift from Mark Rothko, and displayed them in the exact sequence envisioned by the artist.

The experience is largely about time and space. How long can you address a single work? How long does it take to form a conversation with it as well as with the entire set of paintings? The viewer is encouraged to meditate on the colors and contemplate his own space, his own being in relation to the canvases. Rothko completed two other multi-painting commissions following The Seagrams Murals. In 1961 – 1962 he completed a series of works commissioned by the Harvard University. The familiar horizontal floating color forms that have been replaced by the wide bands of vertical “frames” have altogether disappeared in the Harvard paintings. The new gesture is more reminiscent of the early Barnett Newman zips , where he still allowed the color to feather across the soft boundaries and experimented with space. Rothko’s Harvard canvases seem, somehow, more tragic and deeper impregnated with a sense of irony and a desire to break free. The other multi-painting series is on permanent view at the Dominique and John de Menil Collection in Houston, TX. Envisioned as a non-denominational chapel, Rothko conceived the multi-faceted chapel and the paintings within it to help facilitate a spiritual experience for the viewer.

The Rothko Chapel demonstrates the artist’s continued involvement with architecture and his dedication to creating an environment for his works. The somber dark palette of his Chapel paintings recalls Malevich’s The Black Suprematic Rectangle, 1915 (better known as “The Black Square”) where the canvas serves as a screen upon which the viewer projects his own thoughts and images. Each canvas then becomes a source of unique reflection for each individual viewer. Some of the other paintings from this commission are on view at The National Gallery in Washington D.C. *, ** “Mark Rothko – A Biography” J.E.B Breslin, 1993 Images featured in this article: Mark Rothko, White Center, 1950 Mark Rothko, Subway, 1937.

Collection of Christopher Rothko Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon, 1959 © Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel 1997 Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon, 1959 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/ DACS 1998 Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948. © 2012 Barnett Newman Foundation This article © galleryIntell Collection - Mark Rothko´s "Seagram Murals" | Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art HOME > Museum > Collection > Mark Rothko´s "Seagram Murals" The seven paintings of Mark Rothko’s "Seagram Murals" series in the collection of the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art are works that were originally intended to hang in the same room. Rothko (1903-1970) created the Seagram series as a result of a commission that came to the artist in the spring of 1958.

Having become a painter of renown around the middle of the 1950s, he was asked to create paintings to decorate one room of what was to be an exclusive restaurant named The Four Seasons in Manhattan’s Seagram Building. The restaurant was to offer the very finest cuisine and outstanding art, and Rothko was chosen as one of the artists to provide that art to decorate it. At the time, Rothko had come to dislike having other artists’ works hung in the same room with his in group exhibitions, preferring to create an artistic space by filling one room with his own works exclusively. That would be the case with The Four Seasons commission, and Rothko spent about a year and a half creating 30 paintings for the project. These "Seagram Murals" are different in a number of ways from other representative paintings of Rothko that release a light quietly from within a cloud-like expanse of color. First of all, the majority of them are horizontal works and larger that earlier Rothko paintings, with many reaching 4.5m in width.

The reason they are so much larger than his earlier works is that Rothko thought of them as murals, not paintings, and from sketches he left on paper it is clear that he intended to hang several of them in sequence with no space in between, thus literally covering an entire wall in mural fashion. Also, they no longer have the cloud-like color field of his previous paintings. Instead, each painting has a deep reddish brown base color over which is painted a window frame-like form in red or black or a light orange. That said, it is not a literal window frame but the concept of a "window" that is represented—a window to a red expanse of the world beyond, perhaps a door. And whichever, it is closed, it only represents a boundary between this world and the world beyond and it defies any desire we might have to cross over into that world. Some people might feel averse to the color, finding it suggestive of dried blood, or the unique texture of his finely layered paint. But if you sit for a while surrounded by these murals, you may find yourself feeling as if your consciousness itself has been dyed the same red and your thoughts turned toward deep introspection.

In an ironic twist, these Seagram Murals that opened up a new realm of Rothko’s art would never be hung in The Four Seasons restaurant after their completion. Rothko was disappointed with the atmosphere of the restaurant when he visited it for the first time after its opening and ended up breaking his commission contract. Although the murals were thus denied their intended home, nine would be donated to The Tate Gallery (now the Tate Modern in London) in 1970 and seven would eventually come to the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1990. These museums have since constructed rooms specifically for the permanent display of their Seagram Murals. Besides these, collections of Rothko can be seen as originally intended in rooms of their own in the U.S. in The Rothko Room of The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. and The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

Mark Rothko, Sketch for "Mural No.4", 1958, 265.8 x 379.4cm © 2008 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ARS, New York/SPDA, Tokyo The Rothko Room of the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art Mark Rothko, Sketch for "Mural No.1", 1958 Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1958 Mark Rothko, Mural Sketch, 1958 Mark Rothko, Mural Sketch, 1959 Mark Rothko, Mural, Section 1, 1959 Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1959 Room 3: The Seagram Murals | Tate Room 3: The Seagram Murals Mark Rothko Black on Maroon 1958 Tate.

Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Tate © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Red on Maroon Mural, Section 2 1959 Tate. Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Red on Maroon Mural, Section 3 1959 Tate. Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Red on Maroon Mural, Section 4 1959 Tate.

Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Red on Maroon Mural, Section 5 1959 Tate. Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Red on Maroon Mural, Section 74 1959 Tate. Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Untitled Mural for End Wall 1959 National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.

1985.38.5 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 Mark Rothko Untitled 1958 Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998 This room brings together an extensive group of Seagram murals uniting, for the first time, eight of Tate’s murals with a selection of those from Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rothko never devised a ‘final’ scheme for The Four Seasons restaurant. His studio assistant, Dan Rice, recalls that Rothko ‘was very reflective, gathering all the paintings together again and jumbling them up. It would be very difficult to say that one was intended as part of the murals and one was not’. Rather than speculate about the scheme for the Four Seasons, the murals are presented here as Rothko’s first series, in which each work from its very inception enters into a direct dialogue with its counterparts. Within a comparatively narrow compositional scheme, Rothko experimented with varying permutations of the floating ‘frame’ and its background, different surface treatments and the use of vibrant and sombre colour.

Though The Four Seasons offered space for only seven murals, Rothko eventually executed thirty canvases . For his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961 he identified five of these as Mural Sections 2–5 and Mural Section 7. These are displayed here in consecutive order. The other canvases on view are similar in format and degree of finish, the only exception being the two narrow landscape formats which were originally intended to be hung above the dining room’s folding doors. When his 1961 retrospective travelled to London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, Rothko requested that the murals should be hung high, as that was how they were painted, and shown on a warm background colour, which is how they are displayed here.

Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals - Exhibition at Tate Liverpool | Tate Past Event Tate Liverpool Exhibition Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals 2 October 2009 – 21 March 2010 Tate © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 In 1988 Tate Liverpool opened its doors for the very first time with a memorable display of Mark Rothko ’s The Seagram Murals. Over 20 years later the series will make a welcome return to the gallery. From 2 October 2009 – 21 March 2010 Tate Liverpool's ground floor gallery will be transformed into an emotive display of these nine significant paintings – the walls will be painted grey according to Rothko’s specifications and atmospheric lighting will enhance the dramatic qualities of the works. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing the solemn and meditative character of the works-one not to be missed. This display is presented in conjunction with the Tate collection display DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture .

Venue 2 October 2009 – 21 March 2010 Sponsored by A tour of Rothko at Tate Modern Press Release Rothko believed he was "producing an art that would last for 1,000 years". It was a sentiment that was in stark contrast to the new, brash, secularised art emerging in New York in the 1960s. Tate Etc. Simon Grant talks to Brice Marden about his enduring fascination with Rothko’s paintings. Download Harriet A.L. Standeven, 'The History and Manufacture of Lithol Red, a Pigment Used by Mark Rothko in his Seagram and Harvard murals of the 1950s and 1960s' For his 1950s and 1960s Seagram and Harvard murals, American artist Mark Rothko employed lithol red – a highly fugitive pigment that is more commonly associated with the printing industry than artists’ paints. Some of the murals have faded, which has significant consequences for our appreciation of Rothko’s work today.

This paper discusses the chemistry, manufacture, availability and end-use of lithol red in order to gain a greater understanding of how Rothko might have viewed the pigment. Video Achim Borchardt-Hume explores Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals through Tate’s own history in this unique talk. Video ROTHKO, Mark (Seagram Murals) | OCA Painting 1 Learning Log OCA Painting 1 Learning Log Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals and the permanent display at Tate Modern A room at Tate Modern dedicated specifically to Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals – currently 6 paintings hang in this installation at Tate Modern, the oppressive room painted grey and softly lit as Rothko intended. Tate own 9 Seagram canvases in total. Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 – a Russian Abstract Expressionist painter The Seagram Murals were originally a commission for the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York. Rothko was to produce a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant, approx 50 sq m, a long and narrow room.

Rothko painted in all approx 40 works across 3 series, all gigantic canvases done in dark reds and browns. According to “Rothko” by Jacob Baal-Teshuva, a Taschen publication, “He used a warm palette of dark red and brown tones, breaking the horizontal structure of his pictures by turning them at 90 degree angles. In this way he created a work that would relate directly to the architecture of the room. The surfaces of colour recalled architectural elements, as columns, walls, doors and windows, giving the viewer a feeling of confinement, yet presenting him with an unreachable world beyond.” The paintings were never hung in their intended home because Rothko withdrew from the commission, perhaps seeing that what he’d created would not suit a restaurant setting. Today it is impossible to recreate exactly what Rothko envisioned as many of the paintings are split up and in different parts of the world. I visited Tate Modern recently and spent some time with the Seagram Murals. Tate says of this room that “Rothko was influenced by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, with its blind windows and deliberately oppressive atmosphere.

Rothko commented that Michelangelo ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall'” I certainly felt the softening and relaxing atmosphere as I entered the room and on reflection I did feel somewhat trapped by the room, however there few people in the room at the time so space wasnt really an issue. I sat and stared at each painting for a good 5 minutes each, intrigued to know or experience what our society celebrates in these works. I failed and I still don’t understand why these paintings are worth so much money and venerated in the way they are. Yes, I like the colours, I like their softness, even the unexpected variance in tone across each painting (not something I’d noticed before in reproduced images) and I even enjoyed their size, which somehow was a bit intimidating. I concede that perhaps the artist was reaching me after all, his wish that the viewer be forced to contemplate each painting. Perhaps in time, with further viewings I’ll begin to understand but for now I remain as bemused as I was before my visit.

10/10/12 At 3.25pm on Sunday 07/10/12, one of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals was defaced making headline news, after all Rothko’s paintings fetch huge sums of money. For instance according to an article in the Guardian on 08/10/10 by Ben Quinn a Rothko his Orange, Red, Yellow sold earlier this in New York for $86.9m (£53.8m) – the highest price ever fetched by a piece of contemporary art at auction. Vladimir Umanets tagged the painting with the black ink in the bottom right hand corner, it appears to read: “Vladimir Umanets, a potential piece of yellowism.” Umanets claims he engaged with the work and improved it, ultimately increasing its value. That he had done so in order to draw attention to what was going on in contemporary art. So what is ‘Yellowism’? According to an article written by Julia Halperin and published in Blouin Artinfo, “Yellowism is not art, and Yellowism isn’t anti-art,” Umanets told the Telegraph on Monday .

“It’s an element of contemporary visual culture. It’s not an artistic movement. It’s not art, it’s not reality, it’s just Yellowism. The main difference between Yellowism and art is that in art you have got freedom of interpretation, in Yellowism you don’t have freedom of interpretation, everything is about Yellowism, that’s it.” The full article can be seen at I fail to understand what Unmanets says about Yellowism even having read and re-read his statement and many other articles on this incident. I cannot believe that Unmanets think this is NOT a criminal act and that he hasn’t done anything wrong. Surely damaging another persons creative work is considered as criminal damage in the eyes of our society? It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to unfold. Share this: Rothko painting vandalised in Tate Modern - Telegraph Art News Rothko painting vandalised in Tate Modern A vandal defaced a Mark Rothko painting worth tens of millions of pounds in the worst security breach ever to hit Tate Modern.

Mark Rothko's 'Black On Maroon' painting was defaced Photo: JANE MINGAY Follow Astonished witnesses saw the culprit, described as a man in his late 20s, calmly walk up to Black On Maroon (1958) and scrawl a graffiti message in black marker pen or paint. Police were called but the man could not be located and last night no arrest had been made. The Tate’s conservationists are currently assessing the damage. The painting was one of a series, known as the Seagram murals, gifted to the Tate by the artist in 1969. The last Rothko work to sell fetched £53.8 million at Christie’s in New York earlier this year, a new record for contemporary art. The graffiti read: “Vladimir Umanets, A Potential Piece of Yellowism.” It appears to be a reference to a website, run by two individuals called Vladimir Umanets and Marcin Lodyga and described as a “superficial blog” on conceptual art.

Related Articles When art gets vandalised 08 Oct 2012 The website declares that it is a “Manifesto of Yellowism”, saying: “Yellowism is not art or anti-art. Examples of Yellowism can look like works of art but are not works of art.” One of the witnesses to the attack, Tim Wright, posted a picture of the defaced painting on Twitter. He said: “This guy calmly walked up, took out a marker pen and tagged it. Surreal. “We gave a description to the gallery. Very bizarre, he sat there for a while then just went for it and made a quick exit.” Mr Wright, 23, described the culprit as a "trendy" man in his late 20s with facial hair and a tattoo on his neck. Mr Wright, a marketing executive from Bath, said: “He was sitting down in the middle of the room and we were all looking at the paintings. “It was quite strange, we kind of heard before we saw that sound of a pen scratching on canvas. “We looked around and he was finishing a tag and was off like a shot.” He and the other gallery-goers who had seen what had happened rushed to inform staff.

“They were shocked but I think the overwhelming feeling was disappointment because the damage had been done by that point,” he said. Tate Modern is the world’s most-visited art gallery and was packed with visitors yesterday afternoon when the vandal struck in the ‘Rothko Room’. The gallery is covered by CCTV and police are studying the footage. A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “We were alerted at 3.35pm to a report of criminal damage at Tate Modern. “The suspect was a white male, believed to be in his late 20s. No arrest has been made at this time.” The Tate said a visitor had defaced one of the Seagram murals “by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting”. Questions will be asked about security at the gallery, where the Rothkos are not protected by glass and are separated from visitors only be a low-level barrier that can easily be stepped over. Typically, each room is monitored by a single gallery attendant. It was Rothko himself who stipulated how his work should be displayed at the Tate.

The defaced painting was one of a series commissioned from Rothko in 1958 for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, but never installed. In 1969, the artist donated nine of the paintings to the Tate on the proviso that they be displayed “as an immersive environment”. He died the following year. Last year, the National Gallery also fell victim to vandalism when two 17th century masterpieces were defaced. A man sprayed red paint from an aerosol can over Nicolas Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf and The Adoration of the Shepherds. On that occasion, the culprit was swiftly arrested. How Rothko's Seagram murals found their way to London | Global | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Mark Rothko was found on the morning of February 25 1970, lying dead in a wine-dark sea of his own blood. He had cut very deep into his arms at the elbow, and the pool emanating from him on the floor of his studio measured 8ft x 6ft. That is, it was on the scale of his paintings.

It was, to borrow the art critical language of the time, a colour field. New York had a charge sheet a mile long by that time when it came to killing artists, especially painters of Rothko's generation - the abstract expressionists, the epic and baffling, rhetorical and silent, introspective and dazzling movement whose intensity and originality made Manhattan the capital of modernism in the middle of the 20th century. Suicide had already taken Arshile Gorky in 1948. Jackson Pollock was killed in a possibly suicidal drunken car crash in 1956. Another dubiously accidental car crash saw to the sculptor David Smith in 1965. Rothko looked like one of the survivors, and was even insidiously caricatured as a careerist, a bit of a fraud, who had turned the rigour and extremism of abstract expressionist painting into something luscious, colourful, decorative and profitable - until that morning in 1970. Rothko's death changed everything. It transformed the meaning of his work, gave every encounter with his painting a terrible gravity.

It fooled the cursory eye, putting Rothko's motivation so apparently on the surface, so visibly in the public domain, that it made it hard ever to think about him again with any subtlety. His death also ensured that a puzzle at the heart of his painting would never be solved. For Rothko's contract with society was not torn up that day in 1970, but a decade earlier, in 1959. That was when Rothko suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York - the most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter, a tremendously lucrative and enviable chance to take his work to new heights of ambition. Jackson Pollock had attained the freedom and grace of his dripped and flung paintings for just a few years, when he was newly married and off the bottle, until one day he started drinking again and was set on a spiral of destruction. Rothko's crisis over the Seagram murals was comparable. It was his finest moment, and yet also the end of his uneasy truce with success, happiness and America.

Afterwards, his life and art unravelled - the life disastrously, the art with a terrible beauty, becoming ever more open in its dealings with death. The enigma of Rothko's Four Seasons murals is especially urgent for us, the British art public, because we have accidentally ended up as Rothko's heirs. There are not many bona fide masterpieces of modern painting in Britain. Especially, we don't have many great paintings by the abstract expressionists - with a glorious exception. In the late 1960s, Rothko gave nine of the paintings that he had intended for the Four Seasons to the Tate, as a gift - "a princely gesture", as Norman Reid, then director of the Tate, told him. It took a lot of negotiation, Rothko insisting on a permanent, exclusive room for his paintings and resisting any attempt to mix these bleak murals with more accessible examples of his work. The Rothko murals at Tate Modern are lovely in their oppression, erotic in their cruelty. These are paintings that seem to exist on the skin inside an eyelid. They are what you imagine might be the last lights, the final flickers of colour that register in a mind closing down.

Or at the end of the world. "Apocalyptic wallpaper" was a phrase thrown at Rothko's kind of painting as an insult. It is simply a description; the apocalypse is readable in these paintings like a pattern in wallpaper - abstract, pleasurable horror. And yet, sitting in the low-lit, grey-walled room where - controversially - the Tate Modern crowds filter between two doorways as if the Rothko room were a corridor, it seems we're deeply confused about Rothko's gift, about whether we understand it or even want it. The paintings arrived in London on the morning of Rothko's suicide. Dead men tell no tales. It was not clear, when Rothko died in 1970, why he had accepted the unlikely commission to decorate a swanky restaurant on Park Avenue, on the mezzanine floor of Manhattan's most authoritative new skyscraper. And he never satisfactorily explained why he suddenly and violently decided to withdraw his paintings and return the money in 1959. The story of the Four Seasons murals has been written by the power elite of American art.

That's bad luck for Rothko and bad luck for the visitor to Tate Modern who sits in the Rothko room today and tries to make sense of these marvellous, dismal paintings. A myth has been created about Rothko. He has been painted in colours that are not his own, travestied as a religious artist, a maker of spiritual icons of the holy void. This pleases his collectors - it speaks to a certain kind of reverence for art - and it makes Rothko fit into a tradition of abstract painting as spiritual journey that begins in the late 19th century, leads through Kandinsky and Mondrian, and supposedly ends in the Rothko Chapel, maintained by the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, which opened after his death and towards which the Seagram murals are a station of the cross. But this mystical Rothko is unapproachable. He is pompous, grandiloquent, asking to be cut down to size. For many visitors to Tate Modern - you can see them walking quickly past the best art in the place - Rothko is a closed case.

I wanted to reopen the case, go over the evidence about Rothko's greatest series of canvases, follow the clues from Manhattan to Pompeii and Florence - the places where Rothko himself said he found inspirations and analogies. When you pick up the trail, pursue Rothko's bloody red footprints, what you find is a tragedy not of the spirit but of power. It is about an artist pitting his strength against that of America at its most assured and corporate. The Seagram or Four Seasons murals, which are among the very best American art, are not religious paintings. They are furious meditations on the American empire. There is no location that more evocatively, even nostalgically, returns you to the zenith of American self-confidence in the middle of the 20th century than the plaza at 375 Park Avenue, Manhattan. Look downtown and a broad, deep vista of wealth and architectural might opens as far as the MetLife (formerly Pan Am) Building whose wall rises out of the ornate hulk of Grand Central Station, blocking Park Avenue. Look uptown and the vista becomes emptier, wealthier.

Here, on this white and - on a Sunday morning - empty plaza, with its neat pools and calm recession from the street, is the symbolic central point, the x that marks the spot, the locus classicus of American imperium. Looking through the cool high glass wall of the atrium, you see the security guards hanging out by the lift shafts - the space in there is perfect, it is proportionate, open and immaculate. Look up and a sliver of darkness floats on the sky. You have to move back, right across Park Avenue, to get the measure of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architectural masterpiece, the Seagram Building. The 525ft office block, commissioned in 1954 as the new corporate headquarters of Seagram distillers and completed in 1958, is very different from earlier New York skyscrapers with their gargoyles, chrome spires and airship mooring masts. It rejects gothic fantasy for a classical clarity with the icy brilliance of an equation. Lean, mean and devastating, it hovers, a black sentinel, on top of narrow pillars.

Its expensive materials - hand-cast bronze beams, travertine stone, darkened glass - make clear that this austerity is a matter of aesthetic choice rather than economic necessity. The Seagram marked a decisive moment in American corporate architecture. It struck all who saw it as definitive of New York at its most high and mighty. Before it was even finished, it appeared, its windows lit in the Manhattan night, looming over the jazz club in the 1957 film Sweet Smell Of Success. The New York of the Seagram Building is the vicious, glamorous, pounding jazz capital of the film, a joyously acerbic melodrama in which despotic columnist JJ Hunsecker, played with delicious malevolence by Burt Lancaster, rules the city of night with the connivance of his sleazy parasite, publicity agent Tony Curtis. In the film, Hunsecker holds court over cocktails and steaks at 21. He would have felt right at home at New York's newest power-brokering hang-out, the Four Seasons. A pavilion neatly folding out of the Seagram's ground floor, the restaurant hides itself behind elegant drapes.

Planned as an integral part of the Seagram's magnificence by the project's master planners, Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram's director, and the architect and art patron Philip Johnson, the Four Seasons is restrained yet palatial - it has pools, foliage, rich stone and metal fittings, and a fabulous art collection to assure patrons that this is no ordinary restaurant. Dine there today and you can feast your eyes on Picasso's curtain for the Ballets Russes production of The Three-Cornered Hat. There is also a Frank Stella Room. But no Rothkos. "Four Seasons Termed Spectacular Both in Décor and Menu," declared the New York Times in August 1959. "There has never been a restaurant better keyed to the tempo of Manhattan," raved the reviewer. "It is expensive and opulent, and it's perhaps the most exciting restaurant to open in New York within the last two decades." The review praises the "thorough table training" and the food, especially the flamed dishes and the fresh herbs, unusual in 1950s America; the only fault, for the Times, is its succumbing to the national appetite for "gross" portions.

Most chic of all is the art collection. "The walls are hung with a fortune in paintings and tapestries by such modern geniuses as Picasso, Joan Miró and Jackson Pollock." Pollock's Blue Poles was hanging temporarily in the smaller of the two dining rooms, until the delivery of the specially commissioned mural-scale canvases from Mark Rothko that were to be the restaurant's crowning artistic glory. No less an art world guru than Alfred Barr, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, advised that Rothko was the man to provide art for the Four Seasons. Of all the New York painters who became famous at the end of the 1940s, Rothko was the most addicted to the city. When he had the money, he lived on Sixth Avenue, near Radio City Music Hall. He had studios all over the city, changing them often - the Four Seasons murals were painted in a former gymnasium on the Bowery which he rigged up with a false wall and pulley system so he could experiment with their architectural layout. Rothko was intense, solitary, leftwing, used to poverty and failure.

Born into a Jewish family in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903, Rothko - his given name was Marcus Rothkowitz - emigrated with his family to the United States when he was 10. He grew up a poor outsider in Portland, Oregon, but was academically brilliant enough to get into Yale in 1921 - which he hated. In 1923 he headed for New York City, to "wander around, bum about, starve a bit". His New York was a city of deli lunch counters, subway stations, art classrooms, visits to the Metropolitan Museum. And now, after a lifetime spent mainly as an unknown, unsuccessful would-be great artist, Mark Rothko was offered $35,000 to decorate a symbol of the wealth of Manhattan's elite at the height of the cold war. Why did he accept the commission? Accounts of what was said to Rothko and what he thought he was doing differ. The critic Dore Ashton, a regular visitor to Rothko's studio, had the impression that Rothko believed his panels would hang in a boardroom which would be visible from an employees' canteen, that they would be accessible to ordinary office workers.

If Rothko believed this, it was a fantasy. Phyllis Lambert and Philip Johnson deny that he could have been under any such illusion - they say he was perfectly aware he was making paintings for an expensive restaurant. Rothko did know what he was doing, and what kind of people he was doing it for. He saw his Four Seasons murals as violent, even terrorist art, a savage aesthetic revenge, and relished the chance to bite the hands of those who had made him rich. This is what Rothko told John Fischer, a fellow tourist he bumped into in the bar of an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic in the early summer of 1959 after he had been working for several months on the paintings. Fischer was an editor of Harper's Magazine and their conversations over drinks have therefore been recorded - Fischer published Portrait Of The Artist As An Angry Man, a memoir of Rothko, in Harper's Magazine in July 1970. Some guardians of Rothko's memory prefer to think that he was playing up to the journalist, that he didn't mean what he said, because what he said is so incendiary.

Rothko told Fischer he wanted to upset, offend and torture the diners at the Four Seasons, that his motivation was entirely subversive. Fischer quotes Rothko describing the room in that very expensive restaurant in the Seagram Building as "a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off". Rothko didn't seem to Fischer in the least unworldly, let alone spiritual about his intentions. "I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," he gloated, with paintings that will make those rich bastards "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up". There is such a place. It is in Florence. The door off the cloister leads into a room higher than it is wide and starved of floor space by a dark grey staircase that sprawls into the room like an octopus. You feel pushed back to the sides of the room, where you look up at the walls and become conscious that this space is even more oppressive than it first appeared.

The windows, with their massive corbels like flourishes in old books, are sealed: they are framed blanks leading the mind to expect light, air, the outside world, but instead offering no way out, in fact pushing forward into the room, which starts to seem heavier, smaller. The columns that apparently support its weight are too thick, bulging. The carved goat skulls are a clue. Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library, leading off the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, is the anteroom of death. The vestibule is Michelangelo's most audacious architectural creation, and one of the most staggering of all his works - and the most modern. Created in about 1524-6, it is a very early example of poetic expression in architecture; of an architecture deliberately and unmistakably shaped not for function or even for spectacular effect but to alter your sense of space, to make you lose your bearings - to unsettle and disturb. It leads to the mad baroque architecture of Borromini in Rome, and anticipates Daniel Libeskind. Michelangelo did it first and he did it deepest. He created a room that is a nightmare.

Rothko, who had been to Italy before, in 1950, and seen Michelangelo's Laurentian Library - which he would visit again on his 1959 trip - told Fischer he had been influenced by what he described as its "sombre vault", how he started thinking about it when he was painting the Seagram murals. "After I had been at work for some time, I realised that I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo's walls in the staircase of the Medicean Library in Florence," said Rothko. "He achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads for ever against the wall." Hovering at the centre of the Seagram mural Black On Maroon (1958), at Tate Modern, is a black vertical frame like that of a painting or a window. It is an opening that we should be able to penetrate; like the closed-off windows of Michelangelo's vestibule, it ought to allow the mind egress. Instead it just leads back to the maroon barrier.

It is not even "in front of" the maroon; they are on the same plane. Rothko's murals tantalise us with architectural allusions, the idea of space, of windows, doors and portals leading into the great purple yonder, but there is nothing here but two-dimensional colour on vast tracts of canvas. Rothko's remarks to Fischer are a frank revelation of what the Seagram murals are about, and yet all too often discussions of these paintings gloss over Rothko's confession as if it were trivial. That's why you need to look at Michelangelo's architecture. Entering the Laurentian Library, there is no question. Rothko's paintings are translations of Michelangelo's blocked-off windows. Rothko doesn't seem to have stopped thinking about the murals as he toured Italy with his wife Mell, young daughter Kate, and now Fischer. Italy in the 1950s was the place par excellence where world-beating America came to spend money. Rothko was not an unusual American - in his taste for tourism, he was typical. And where else would cold war America, at the height of the American Century, find its reflection but amid the ruins of the Roman Empire?

Ships to Italy docked at Naples. Before they travelled north to Rome, and Florence and the Laurentian Library, the Rothkos went to Pompeii. Walking amid the city of the dead, Rothko brooded on his work. In the most atmospheric of the Pompeiian houses, the Villa of the Mysteries, he was struck by the use of surprisingly deep colours for a decorative scheme - black and red. Rothko told Fischer that in the villa he sensed "a deep affinity" between the Seagram murals and the Roman wall paintings - "the same feeling, the same broad expanses of sombre colour". The Villa of the Mysteries is outside the city, and is more aristocratic and private than the rest of the Pompeiian houses. Its rooms speak of secrets - specifically the underground worship of Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. It derives its name from an astonishing fresco depicting a rite of initiation into Dionysus's cult that covers the walls of a triclinium, a dining room. This is a very strange dining room.

As strange, and at once as luxurious and hellish, as the dining room Rothko planned in New York - a place where, instead of making small talk, diners would be menaced by sensual, occult, claustrophobic paintings. I think Rothko talked about Pompeii with false casualness. It is inconceivable that the "affinities" between his latest work and the Villa of the Mysteries struck him by chance, or that they were only to do with colour. Rothko was deeply familiar with the Roman wall paintings from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he studied closely Nietzsche's The Birth Of Tragedy, which contrasted the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. He wanted his art to be Dionysian, beyond reason. Rothko's project for the Four Seasons was to create an anti-architecture that scorned the rational order of Mies van der Rohe's building, that tormented the "rich bastards" sitting down to a civilised lunch. He wanted the deathly space of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library to push in on them, deny them exit.

He spoke of himself as an architect - "I have created a place," he said when he looked at the murals in his Bowery studio. It's very nice to go travellin', sang Frank Sinatra, but it's so much nicer to come home. As Rothko sailed back from Europe in the summer of 1959, the Four Seasons was preparing to open. Back in New York, Rothko booked a table for himself and Mell. What did they eat, what did they talk about? It doesn't seem to have been a happy meal. He called a friend that evening to say he was sending back the money and withdrawing his paintings. "Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine," he told his studio assistant. Rothko's exploration of sinister settings on his Italian trip suggests he really was acting, as he said, from "malice" in painting the Four Seasons murals. But it also suggests he wanted to prove that painting could exert power - that he could subvert his brief as a "decorative" artist and transform a toney restaurant into a space dominated by sublime art.

Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. His Seagram murals remain the most challenging art in Tate Modern - because they demand your time, emotion, thought and commitment, only to throw these things back in your face, confronting the mind with a wall, a terminal chamber. But no artist in New York in 1959 had that kind of power. Sitting amid the buzz and excess of the Four Seasons, Rothko must have felt that he had been deluded - that the wealthy diners were not going to be harrowed. That art could not change anything. That his paintings would just be decoration after all. You can picture JJ Hunsecker at the next table, looking at him with contempt. It's so very difficult to be an artist, sneers Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success, in this crudest of all possible worlds · This essay forms the basis of the final talk in Painting Bites Back, a course led by Jonathan Jones at Tate Modern, London SE1, to be given on December 9. Rothko's Seagram murals are on permanent display at Tate Modern, in association with BT.

Rothko Seagram Murals Wednesday and Thursday, February 22 and 23, 12:30 p.m. East Building Auditorium This documentary film tells the story behind the creation of the room designed for Rothko's Seagram murals in London's Tate Modern. Rothko's Rooms (2000, 45 minutes) is filled with anecdotes about the artist culled from friends, family members, and curators. Panel Discussion Sunday, January 29, 3:30 p.m. Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, Kreeger Theater During the last 50 years, Mark Rothko has become a monolithic figure in American culture, but where is our 21st-century understanding of the noted abstract expressionist rooted? Lynn Russell, director of education, National Gallery of Art, will moderate a discussion with Gallery experts Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art and lead author of the Rothko works on paper catalogue raisonné, exploring how Rothko has figured in the public imagination. More information is available at .

Gallery Shops In celebration of Arena Stage's production as well as Rothko's many works in the Gallery's permanent collection, the Shops offer an array of items related to the artist's life and work. A wide selection of publications, including the definitive catalogue raisonné of his works on canvas, will be available, as well as postcard and notebook sets, posters featuring works by Rothko from the Gallery's collection, and the documentary film Rothko's Rooms. Mark Rothko and the National Gallery of Art In 1986 the Mark Rothko Foundation determined that its mission to conserve its collection of Rothko's art and to enhance and promote Rothko's legacy through scholarly research and exhibitions would best be served by closing its doors and strategically placing his canvases and works on paper in major museums internationally. Before disbanding, they selected 35 institutions, among them the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Tate Gallery, London; and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

As the principal recipient of the Rothko Foundation's largesse, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, became the largest public repository of Rothko's work, receiving 296 paintings on canvas and paper, a study collection of more than 600 works on paper, and research materials, including conservation records and exhibition reviews. In 2007 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko further enhanced the Gallery's holdings by donating to its library the manuscript for their father's book, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art, which was edited by Christopher Rothko and published in 2004 by Yale University Press. A rotating selection of Rothko's canvases is consistently on view at the National Gallery, including the 2003–2007 installation Rothko's Mural Projects, which was mounted to mark the centennial of Rothko's birth. In 1998 Jeffrey Weiss, then the Gallery's curator of modern and contemporary art, organized Mark Rothko, a retrospective that traveled to New York and Paris. In 1984 Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, circulated by the American Federation of Arts, opened at the Gallery and traveled throughout the United States.

Additionally, since receiving the gift from the Mark Rothko Foundation in 1986, the Gallery's National Lending Service has lent more than 125 works by Rothko to temporary exhibitions in almost 100 museums, galleries, and embassies worldwide. The National Gallery of Art is publishing a multivolume catalogue raisonné, Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper, which is being prepared by a team led by Ruth Fine with Laili Nasr and Janet Blyberg. Documenting more than 2,700 objects that are largely unknown to both art specialists and the public and demonstrating the range of Rothko's creative achievement, these volumes will be the definitive historical record of Rothko's oeuvre on paper. Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper follows the 1998 catalogue raisonné, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas by David Anfam, copublished by the National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, which documented 835 known paintings. General Information The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public.

They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or visit the Gallery's Web site at . Follow the Gallery on Facebook at , Twitter at , and Instagram at . Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms.

Items larger than 17 by 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms. Rothko painting defaced at Tate Modern | Art and design | The Guardian Mark Rothko Rothko painting defaced at Tate Modern Man inscribes words in black ink in corner of 1958 canvas Black on Maroon before quickly leaving room A photo posted on Twitter of the defaced corner of Rothko's Black on Maroon Sunday 7 October 2012 16.10 EDT First published on Sunday 7 October 2012 16.10 EDT Close This article is 4 years old A man has defaced a multimillion-pound Mark Rothko mural hanging in the Tate Modern gallery in front of onlookers. A police investigation is now under way into the vandalism of the US artist's work. A visitor to the museum said he raised the alarm after a man inscribed some words in black ink in a corner of Rothko's 1958 canvas Black on Maroon, before quickly leaving the room. Tim Wright, who posted a picture on Twitter of the canvas after it was defaced , said that he saw the man sitting quietly in front of the painting beforehand.

"Then we heard the sound of a pen, but by the time we turned around he was pretty much finished with his tag," said Wright, who was with his girlfriend on a weekend visit to London from Bristol. "The pen ink then just dripped down the painting. Once we realised what had happened, we went to find a member of staff. They were really shocked when they came and saw what he had done." The museum said in a statement: "Tate can confirm that at 15.25 this afternoon there was an incident at Tate Modern in which a visitor defaced one of Rothko's Seagram murals by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting. The police are currently investigating the incident." The gallery was closed for a short time after the incident. The canvas, one of a number by Rothko owned by the Tate, was in a room with several other works painted by the Russian-born artist, who emigrated to the US at the age of 10 and went on to become one of America's most important postwar artists. His work commands huge prices.

In May, his Orange, Red, Yellow was sold in New York for $86.9m (£53.8m) – the highest price ever fetched by a piece of contemporary art at auction. The Seagram murals were painted by Rothko in 1958 for Manhattan's Four Seasons restaurant, but they were never installed. He presented a number of them to the Tate gallery shortly before he died in 1970. This year, Tate Modern opened a new Rothko Room as part of its rehung permanent galleries. Art lovers made their feelings known on Twitter, scrutinising the image of the defacement, which appeared to include the word "Vladimir". "I am a naturally peaceful person, but I wouldn't be that upset if 'Vladimir' accidentally met with a baseball bat," said one. The graffiti on the painting appears to read "a potential piece of yellowism." According to an online manifesto, Yellowism is an artistic movement run by two people named Vladimir Umanets and Marcin Lodyga.

The defacing of the Queen's portrait is the latest act of art vandalism, including a Mark Rothko at Tate Modern and a Delacroix at the Lens Louvre, says Jonathan Jones Published: 16 Jun 2013 Fathers4Justice member to appear in court on Friday after paint was sprayed on picture in Westminster Abbey Published: 13 Jun 2013 Vladimir Umanets says he is responsible for inscribing black ink in corner of 1958 canvas Black on Maroon Published: 7 Oct 2012 Jonathan Jones: From Rothko to Michelangelo and Rembrandt, it seems to be the most powerful works of art that draw the vandals Published: 8 Oct 2012

Question: Which artist painted 'The Seagram Murals'?
Answer: MARK ROTHKO