NO. 10
MARK ROTHKO, 1950
So, look around. Rothko has somehow taken over the whole room. Most artists in this building get a wall. Maybe a corner. This guy gets the place to himself. He didn't call MoMA and demand it. But this is pretty close to how he wanted these paintings seen. Hang them low. Keep the light down. Don't let people stroll past, glance over, check Rothko off the list. He wanted you in there with them. Which is where you are. So you might as well use it. Get closer than feels polite. About eighteen inches. Now look at the yellow. Part of the trick is underneath. Under this entire painting is blue. He covered the whole canvas first with a thin wash of indigo. Then he started laying the other colors over it. White. Yellow. Cream. Thin enough that the earlier layers never completely shut up. Get close to the yellow and there's red underneath that too. At the edges, all these colors start leaking into each other's business. That's where a lot of the shimmer comes from. Nothing is just sitting on top. Now the other nice thing about this painting. It was the first Rothko ever to enter MoMA's collection. March 1952. Philip Johnson buys it from the Betty Parsons Gallery and hands it over. But the year before, curator Dorothy Miller had already spotted it while making the rounds of galleries. She's taking notes. And next to this painting she writes: Number ten. MMA? As in Museum of Modern Art. With a question mark.