NO. 37/NO. 19 (SLATE BLUE AND BROWN ON PLUM)
MARK ROTHKO, 1958
The lights are going down in this one. Plum. Slate. A bar of brown. Ten years earlier, these bands ran yellow and orange. Same architecture. Dimmer room. And the year matters, because 1958 is when Rothko gets the best Rothko job there is. The Four Seasons. Fanciest restaurant in New York. Inside the brand-new Seagram Building. All glass, bronze, money, manners. They hire Rothko to paint murals for the dining room. The biggest commission of his life. Thirty-five thousand dollars. He takes it. Then, on an ocean liner to Europe, he gets talking with a magazine editor and tells him what he's actually up to. The way the editor remembered it, Rothko wanted to ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever ate in that room. He wanted the diners to feel bricked in. A man took a decorating job and turned it into a trap. Then he and his wife finally go eat at the Four Seasons. He comes home furious. Quits the commission. Sends back the money. Anybody who would eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices, he tells his assistant, would never look at a painting of his. Now, this canvas is not one of the murals. But it is what his palette was doing that same year, while all of that was starting. Look at it again. Slate pressing down on plum. A brown bar locked underneath. People call the late Rothkos gloomy. Maybe. Or maybe this is what it looks like when a painter stops trying to charm the room.