The Rothko Murals: Lightning in a (Seagram’s) Bottle [View all]

[CTyankee]

There is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen
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from the “Seagram Murals”
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In 1958 the Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, was completed.The Seagram Building, housing the corporate offices of the Canadian distillers, is an iconic expression of corporate capitalism in mid twentieth century architecture. A restrained, simple rectilinear design made with expensive materials, it is perhaps the most elegant office tower constructed in New York during the postwar skyscraper boom.

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Philip Johnson approached Mark Rothko, by then achieving prominence as an artist of his own revolutionary color field style, about painting murals for the Seagram Building’s Four Seasons Restaurant. It would be the premier site of the era’s “power lunch” crowd. The building was an assertion of a capitalistic dominance in the great American era of a postwar economic triumphalism. Rothko relished the idea of his works being shoved in the face of such capitalists. Rothko famously said that he hoped the Seagram murals would “ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room,” and that if the restaurant refused to hang the works it would be “the ultimate compliment.”

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The Four Seasons, 1959

I have wondered if Rothko’s color field style is trying to push out into the light in brightness or attempting to hold back a looming dark. Tenuous, shimmering they seem to call out to you. They rarely let you go after just a glance or two. In fact, there is no “glance” at all. It is more like a perverse seduction that the viewer undergoes. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl advises: “Look long, for best results.”

An interesting note on Rothko’s color choices. He employed a color known as Lithol Red. It was commonly used in the 1950s but it is also classified as a “fugitive pigment,” which means it is prone to suffer from fading as time goes on. And, indeed, exposure to high levels of light led to dramatic fading of his Harvard murals (along with out and out neglect and abuse on the part of the Harvard administration), and they were removed from display in 1979. There is also evidence of fading on Tate’s Seagram murals, although to a much lesser degree.The rationale behind Rothko’s choice of lithol red is unclear, and we don’t know whether he was aware of its light-sensitive nature. It seems unthinkable that he would invite destruction of his art.

Rothko’s devotion to color was also a result of the influence of Matisse’s “The Red Studio.” He learned from Matisse that color could very well be the subject of a picture. As Simon Schama puts it in “The Power of Art”

“Rothko recalled standing in front of this painting almost every day for months following its acquisition by The Museum of Modern Art in 1949. And he remarked, when you looked at this painting 'you became that color, you became totally saturated with it as if it were music.'”

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The Red Studio, Henri Matisse, 1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York

In 1950, Rothko toured Italy and went to the Laurentian Library of the cloister of San Lorenzo, a dark and disorienting vision of Michelangelo’s embrace of Mannerism. Rothko later said that he fashioned the Seagram Building murals after it, referring to the library’s effect on viewers. They “feel 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.”

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pic of laurentian library

Schjeldahl, who writes art reviews for the New Yorker, tells of his experience in viewing Rothkos... “the concentration required exhausts me and leaves me jangled and anxious. I don't finish looking at the paintings. I break off, turning my back on their tireless radiance.” But Professor Schama has stated that you cannot really turn away from a Rothko painting because “it burns the back of your neck.”

Perhaps Rothko was influenced by his good friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, who wrote

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Mark Rothko did not turn in the face of the dark. He embraced it as part of his existence and part of his art. But just as several of his Seagram murals were being delivered to the Tate Museum in London he opened his veins with a razor blade and was found dead later in his Bowery studio. He had considered the offer from Johnson, going through an excruciating soul searching that made him physically ill. In anger and misery he decided that the effect he desired, that of capitalists forced to examine what they were doing with their lives, would not result in an epiphany for the power lunch set. Ruining their lunch would not ruin their careers. Soul-less plutocrats could not contemplate, much less feel, an evocation of existential dread. So Rothko canceled the commission, returning an advance payment that had already been made.

The advent of Pop Art significantly worsened Rothko’s anguish. Suddenly, the art scene in New York became swept up in Warhol’s repeating images of Marilyn, Jasper Johns’ flags, Roy Lichtenstein’s comics. They were young and brash and in your face. They were dismissive, if not downright contemptuous of Abstract Expressionism. Frank Stella quite openly said he wanted to “purge the romance of Abstract Expression” from his canvas.

“These young artists are out to murder us,” Rothko morosely observed.

By then the artist was going deeper into his alcoholism and chain smoking, causing him to have serious health problems. His second marriage had fallen apart. He was a medical and psychological catastrophe waiting to happen. And on February 20, 1970 it did.

The Seagram Murals were distributed to three museums, and are seen here

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Kawamura Museum of Art, Japan

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The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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The Tate Modern, London, UK