Rothko's Seagram Murals - Part IV

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Rothko's Seagram Murals: 

A Tumultuous Journey to the Tate
Part IV

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Section 3), 1959

Following the confusion and distress of the Seagram commission, Rothko wanted complete authority over the exhibition of any of his works. “When Sir Norman Reid, Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Rothko in 1965 with the proposal that a special room be allocated in the Tate for his work, Rothko saw another opportunity to ‘control the situation.’ He rejected Reid’s proposal that he give a ‘representative’ group of paintings, offering instead a group of the Seagram Murals” (Ashton 156). Of course flattered by the proposal, Rothko saw the opportunity to secure a permanent one-man show. He had previously offered the whole of his 1961 Whitechapel exhibition to the New York Museum of Modern Art, only to be declined due to a lack of available gallery space (Breslin 513). So the fact that the Tate was willing to commit a permanent gallery space most certainly attracted him. Additionally, Rothko would have liked that this space would guarantee the continued unification of his paintings. As John Fisher, the fellow passenger abroad the USS Constitution in 1959, remarked: 

"Moreover, he repeatedly remarked that ‘no picture can be judged by itself.’ Everything an artist produces, he believed, was a part of his continuous development, and therefore his entire output should be regarded as a single whole. This view, it seemed to me, implies a museum or a private collection large enough to keep at least a substantial sequence of a painter’s work on permanent display" (Rothko and LĆ³pez-Remiro 134).

Believing that an artist cannot be judged by a single painting, Rothko would have been pleased to have a collection of paintings hanging together permanently on the walls of the Tate.

Ed. Note: Barstow alumna Sydney Ayers, '09, has graciously allowed My Kid Could Paint That to publish one of her recent papers on Mark Rothko. We will present the paper in seven parts. Ayers studies art history at Dartmouth University, and this spring she will complete her senior honors thesis on the English country houses of architect Robert Adam.

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