After returning home from a voyage to Italy, France, Belgium and England, Mark Rothko went to dinner with his wife at the fashionable Four Seasons Restaurant on Park Avenue in New York City (Rothko and Wick 216). While this sounds like the extravagant lifestyle of a wealthy man about town, Rothko was, in fact, simply an unassuming artist. For the majority of his career, since the 1920s, Rothko struggled to find success within the New York art circles; it was not until the late 1940s that he developed his famous and signature style of painting. In 1958 Rothko received one of the largest commissions of his time in the form of the Seagram Murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant. However, Rothko eventually resigned the commission, leaving dozens of canvas works without a home. Eventually, in 1970, Rothko donated a series of paintings from the Seagram project to the Tate Museum in London. Now the real question becomes why Rothko chose the Tate as the destination for this bequest. Several factors come into play in his decision, including the appreciation that he felt from viewers, artists and critics in England; however, his decision was ultimately hinged on the guarantee that his works would be kept together as per his specifications, and as the focus of the Tate’s Gallery 18—a vast difference from the realities of the Four Seasons Restaurant and the Seagram commission.

In 1958, Rothko was offered the commission to decorate the walls of the Four Seasons Restaurant with new original murals: “On June 6, 1958, Sidney Janis wrote a letter to Phyllis Lambert, confirming conversations between Johnson and Rothko in which they had agreed that the artist would provide ‘500 to 600 square feet of paintings’ for $35,000… According to Phillip Johnson, Rothko ‘was given carte blanche to design the wall decorations any way he chose'” (Breslin 373). Rothko accepted the commission for the restaurant and quickly began to paint. He set up a new studio in a former YMCA gymnasium building located at 222 Bowery (Breslin 380-1). With total creative freedom over the project, Rothko was able to paint whatever he wanted and create however he chose.

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.