In 1958, Mark Rothko was invited to paint a cycle of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant inside the Seagram Building, then the epicentre of New York’s chic Modernism. It was a commission of stature, yet within two years, he rejected it outright, convinced that his work would be reduced to background ornament for a wealthy clientele. What he produced instead became one of the defining statements of his practice.
Rothko’s canvases of the early 1950s were renowned for their radiant blocks of colour, suspended in hazy fields that suggested transcendence and light. By contrast, the Seagram murals are grounded in a darker register. Maroon, deep red, plum, and near-black dominate the palette. Rectangular forms, no longer floating, press heavily against their edges, creating a sense of enclosure rather than release.
Approximately 30 in number, the Seagram murals represent a significant departure from Rothko’s earlier works that had earned him international acclaim. The palette is subdued, featuring maroon, near-black, and iron red, arranged in weighty rectangles that enclose space rather than open it. These works, in contrast to his previously expansive ones, create a confining atmosphere, akin to a chapel.
Rothko worked on the murals with architectural precision, building a scaffold in his East 69th Street studio to replicate the proportions of the restaurant. The paintings were designed as an immersive environment, where colour serves as architecture and mood as structure. The refusal to deliver them was both practical and ideological—an insistence that painting was not decoration but a confrontation with the viewer.
Designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, the Seagram Building embodied the Modernist ethos of the late 1950s, with steel, glass, and precision engineering serving as symbols of corporate confidence and prestige. To decorate the Four Seasons, the restaurant conceived as its jewel, Rothko was asked to produce a cycle of large-scale paintings. He was under the impression that the paintings were destined for a workers’ commissary. When he discovered the paintings would be located in a five-star restaurant, his socialist roots drove him to withdraw the commission. By 1960, Rothko had grown sure that his paintings would be lost in the spectacle of the Four Seasons. The restaurant attracted a crowd of wealthy, sophisticated social climbers—precisely the kind of audience he had no interest in pleasing. He told friends he wanted the murals to “ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”
Nine canvases were gifted to the Tate in 1969. They are permanently installed in a dedicated room, where their brooding presence creates an environment of concentrated stillness. Thirteen others belong to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A further seven are held at Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, due to be relocated to Tokyo in 2030. Other canvases remain with the Rothko family estate. Though scattered, each group functions as a satellite of the original cycle—fragments of a project that never reached its intended interior. Other canvases remain with the Rothko family estate, in scattered collections—remnants of a commission that was never realised.
The dispersal of the Seagram Murals has, paradoxically, secured their status. Each group of works functions as a satellite of the original vision—spaces where Rothko’s “dark luminosity” continues to exert its psychological weight. What was once a commission for a corporate dining room has become, in its fractured form, a series of global shrines to an artist’s refusal to compromise.
The shift in mood within the Seagram murals has frequently been read as evidence of Rothko’s inner turmoil, but the works also stand as a conscious refusal of painting as decoration. Where his earlier canvases opened into fields of light and reflection, these panels close in, pressing heavily against the viewer. Their atmosphere evokes not the openness of a chapel but the confinement of a crypt, charged with a sense of tragedy.
The Seagram murals also mark a distinct shift in Rothko’s technique. He built their complex, glowing surfaces through a meticulous process of layering. Moving beyond traditional paints, he mixed egg tempera with modern synthetic resins. This combination dried quickly, giving him the precision to apply thin, translucent films of colour in rapid succession.
He also used phenol formaldehyde, which acted as a barrier to keep the layers of paint separate. This allowed each translucent glaze to maintain its own depth of tone while still playing off the colours underneath. The final effect is a canvas that seems to hold a soft, internal light, as if the painting itself is glowing.
Upon close inspection, Rothko’s distinctive methods become apparent: washes of turpentine-thinned pigment that seep into the unprimed canvas fibres; soft, dissolved edges achieved by rubbing solvent back into the paint with a rag; and glazes that produce a subtle oscillation between matte and gloss. These techniques, combined with his unique layering system, created the distinctive “dark luminosity” of the cycle—an effect that continues to unsettle and captivate viewers.
Rothko’s innovative methods, however, introduced a lasting vulnerability. He chose to work with Lithol Red, a pigment prized for its intensity but designed for commercial printing, rather than for permanent works of art. While brilliantly vivid initially, the colour is highly susceptible to light. This fragility was compounded by Rothko’s decision not to apply a protective varnish. As a result, the murals are in a delicate state, posing a persistent challenge for conservators at the Tate. Their task is a tricky balancing act: preserving the artist’s original intent while preventing the deterioration of paintings that were inherently unstable from the start. Rothko wished to maintain the delicate variations in surface quality—areas that gleam faintly against passages that are matte, producing a tactile richness. To coat them in a unifying layer would have flattened these nuances and dulled their resonance.
What makes the Seagram cycle so significant is not merely its technical daring but its conception as an environment. Rothko’s ambition was to transform a room into a site of encounter, where colour and scale would engulf the viewer and suspend them in states of unease, solemnity, and reflection. The works resist casual looking: their scale demands presence, their mood resists distraction. The sombre hues and brooding presence of the canvases prefigure the final years of his life, marked by deepening depression and eventual suicide.
The Seagram murals remain a touchstone for artists and audiences alike. More than six decades after their making, they continue to envelop viewers in an atmosphere where beauty, despair, and awe collide. In rejecting the Four Seasons, Rothko created a cycle of works that surpassed the circumstances of their commission. Today, they endure not as failed décor but as one of the most potent statements of twentieth-century painting—monuments to the possibility of art as an immersive, existential experience.