UNTITLED
MARK ROTHKO, 1969–1970
Almost all the color is gone. Black on top. Gray underneath. One hard line between them. And this thin white border around the whole thing. That border is new. Here's what changed. April 1968. Doctors find an aneurysm in Rothko's aorta. Then they tell a man who's spent years making paintings bigger than people: nothing taller than three feet. At first, he listens. Smaller work. A lot of paper. Acrylic instead of those slow layers of oil. But then look at this one. Six and a half feet tall. So much for three feet. He's working in a converted carriage house on East Sixty-Ninth Street. Huge skylight overhead. And Rothko has a parachute rigged underneath it so he can pull it back and forth and control the daylight. And around this time, black and gray keep showing up. Which is where everybody starts getting clever. It's '69, you know. Apollo 11. So, okay, moonscape. Rothko's near the end of his life, so then it becomes about death. Obviously. Except his very last painting was bright red. So the easy story, dark colors equals dark mood, doesn't really hold. Better to look at what's actually here. The gray isn't empty. It's scrubbed, it's streaked. The black above it barely moves. And between them, one blunt line. A horizon, maybe. If you need it to be. Here's what we actually know. On the morning of February 25, 1970, Rothko's Seagram paintings arrived at the Tate in London. The ones he made for that restaurant, walked away from, then eventually gave to the museum. That same morning, back in New York, his assistant found him in the studio. Rothko had taken his own life. He was sixty-six.