Untitled (Seagram Mural sketch) 1958

Mark Rothko made this untitled sketch for the Seagram Murals with oil paint on canvas sometime in the late 1950s. Rothko secured a large commission for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, a modernist icon designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, and initially he conceived the paintings for this space. The Seagram Building embodies corporate power and high-end consumption in post-war America. Rothko's artistic trajectory, however, moved from figuration to pure abstraction, a move often interpreted as a rejection of consumer culture and a search for universal, spiritual values. The dark, somber tones and the almost claustrophobic composition of the Seagram Murals, therefore, can be seen as a critique of the very institutions that commissioned them. Art historians use a range of resources, from the artist's writings to the social history of the period, in order to understand his work. Rothko eventually withdrew from the Seagram commission, and the murals now reside in museum collections, constantly open to renewed scrutiny and interpretation.