Rothko’s Seagram Murals are a rejection of the institutions that birthed them. Their scale, colour and architecture produce durational feedback that echoes long after you have viewed them. A sigh, conviction and altered mood are expected. What the viewer is presented with isn’t a window, but a mirror – a tarnished one at that. Within this room, what is mirrored is a certain finality. A finality that makes you look inward.
Both light and sound throughout the room is absorbed. The edges bleed into one another. Tones of blood, dried. Shades of coal, purple culminate in aftermath, spent energy and bruising. The colours, alongside the scale, create a silence. A silence that isn’t just heard but seen. Rothko brings the quiet of this room into being. As if you are walking into a confessional chamber. What these works conjure up is what the viewer carries with them into the room. The finality here is the sense that it is just you in the room and that you are alone. No beauty or inspiration takes hold. This is a room for contemplation.
These pieces were commissioned for an elite dining room. Yet what we see here are sarcophagus-like shapes that dominate the canvases. Painted tombstones. These pieces would not complement a diner’s experience. Diners would be digesting their own emotions, preoccupations, mental states in front of these paintings. This was Rothko’s intention.
The murals are a rejection of the idea that scale, luxury and productivity yield meaning within our lives. Rothko outwardly contests the economic and patronage institutions that commissioned them. These institutions value display, performance, visibility. Rothko sees the tragic failure of this kind of spectacle to satisfy the psyche, bringing this idea to canvas. Instead of comforting the diners, these pieces reassert inwardness. The material realm does not hold the answers. The answers, according to these paintings, are contained within.
What strikes me most about these works is the alienation, the anomie that submerges the viewer. These pieces negate our surroundings. The combination of form and colour creates a finality of presence through this negation. It is this void that the grandeur of modernity tries to conceal. For Rothko, only interior truths can face the dilemma of our estrangement and alienation. These works, displayed together, provide the medium to achieve that.
The Seagram Murals highlight the value Rothko placed on the deeper, more meaningful questions. The kind of questions that confront us. That is what the viewer is made to reconcile when faced with these canvases: Who are you?
Disclaimer
Everything written here is my own reflection — imperfect, interpretive, and open to disagreement. Nothing is meant to offend or exclude anyone. Art invites feeling and thought in equal measure; what’s offered here is simply one person’s encounter with it.
References
Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. Oxford University Press, 1983.
Fischer, John. “Conversations with Rothko.” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1959.
Morley, Simon. Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Thames & Hudson, 2003.
O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. University of California Press, 1976.
Rothko, Mark. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. Edited by Christopher Rothko, Yale University Press, 2004.
Rodman, Selden. Conversations with Artists. Capricorn Books, 1961.
Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. Harper & Row, 1970.
Tate Modern. Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals. Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Publishing, 2008.