“I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions…The people who weep before my picture are having the same religious experience I had when painting them.”
Mark Rothko quoted in: Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957, pp. 93-4

I lluminated by an enigmatic and mesmeric inner radiance, Untitled (Black on Maroon) profoundly demonstrates the extraordinary alchemical genius that characterizes Mark Rothko’s inimitable oeuvre. Painted in 1958, at the apex of his artistic and critical achievements and the same year in which he began his infamous Seagram Murals, this shimmering canvas embodies the artist’s remarkable ability to evoke the sublime and inspire powerful, universal emotions through pure, elegant abstraction. Untitled (Black on Maroon) appears to glow from within, its innumerable hues masterfully layered one upon another in carefully constructed blocks to create a surface that softly burns like the embers of a nascent flame. Form and color, the two fundamental elements of Rothko’s signature philosophical approach to painting, are here mystically united to transform the canvas into a breathtaking physical expression of the human condition. Enveloping the viewer in the grand scale of its meditative aura, the present work heralds the creative crescendo of the artist’s legendary career and demonstrates the spectacular chromatic chemistry that has cemented Rothko’s place as one of the greatest masters of twentieth-century painting.

Left: MARK ROTHKO, FOUR DARKS IN RED, 1958. DIGITAL IMAGE © WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK / LICENSED BY SCALA / ART RESOURCE, NY. ART © KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.

Right: MARK ROTHKO, NO. 16 (RED, BROWN AND BLACK), 1958. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. ART © KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, THE DREAMER, 1820-1840. HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG.

The dramatic and lugubrious pairing of black and maroon exemplified by the present work is emblematic of the meditative palette for which Rothko is celebrated, and indeed conjures the twilight mystery the artist sought to impart in his canvases. By the time this work was executed in 1958, Rothko had moved away from the brilliant yellows, vibrant pinks, and sumptuous oranges of his earlier paintings and instead embraced a more somber and ominous palette, marking the beginning of what is now widely regarded as the most significant period of his career. In that year, Rothko was approached by architect Philip Johnson and Phyllis Lambert, heiress to the Seagram fortune, to produce a series of works for the Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram’s new headquarters on New York’s Park Avenue. The story of the Seagram Murals has since become the stuff of legend: although Rothko initially seized upon the commission with vigor, producing a magnificent series of large-scale canvases in a portentous scheme of reds and blacks, he ultimately withdrew from the contract and returned the hefty fee he had been paid.

A Pivotal Year: Mark Rothko’s Paintings from 1958

1958 was a key turning point in Mark Rothko’s career. It was in this year that Rothko embarked on his magnum opus, The Seagram Murals, which are on permanent display in a purpose built room in Tate Modern in London. Indeed, of the 36 paintings that Mark Rothko executed in 1958, half are housed in institutional collections, and the remainder pepper some of the world’s greatest private collections.
BARNETT NEWMAN, THE COVENANT, 1949. HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, WASHINGTON, D.C. ART © 2020 BARNETT NEWMAN FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Considering the murals to be among his greatest artistic achievements, Rothko instead presented nine of the monumental paintings to Tate Gallery in London, which offered an environment conducive to the lingering contemplation and introspection these soaring canvases invite. Dore Ashton, the critic and close friend of the artist, has posited that the shift in his palette, solidified by the murals, offered Rothko the opportunity to deal “with the exasperation at the general misinterpretation of his earlier work—especially the effusive yellow, orange and pink of three years back. He seemed to be saying in these new foreboding works that he was never painting luxe, calme and volupté, if we had only known it” (Dore Ashton quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Rothko: The Late Series, 2008, p. 20). Painted in the same year and a similar range of colors to the Seagram Murals, Untitled (Black on Maroon) invokes the same hushed grace and transcendent intensity associated with those renowned masterworks.

MARK ROTHKO, BLACK ON MAROON, 1958. TATE MUSEUM, LONDON. ART © 1998 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL & CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

A veritable feast for the senses, the ethereal surface of Untitled (Black on Maroon) immerses the viewer in meditative depths of pigment, its captivating compositional dynamism bespeaking the full maturation of the artist’s career-long rigorous investigation into the absolute limits of painterly abstraction. Seeking to establish a pure and direct form of painting that could collapse the gap between transcendent idea and material expression, Rothko radically simplified his canvas into a few fields of radiant color. Each passage is carefully built up, tone upon tone, in a multitude of diaphanous layers, each a subtly different register than the last, the cumulative effect being a composition that resonates with a visceral magnetic pull that draws the viewer irresistibly inward. Here, he summons the complete spectrum of reds to his palette, as scarlet, maroon, currant, and mahogany collide and coalesce into a ground like molten lava. Cast against this rich dusky field are two velvety expanses of charcoal, their shadowy washes of sooty midnight blue parting like clouds here and there to reveal flashes of the underlying ruby, garnet, and vermilion. The rich warmth of the saturated, sensuous bloodlike tones is elegantly counterbalanced by the cool obsidian shrouds; the ineffable tension between the smoldering crimson and the implicitly tragic darkness powerfully expresses a deep psychological truth. This spiritual, even divine, quality is a hallmark of Rothko’s mature paintings, when he had finally achieved what he always strove to convey. As John Elderfield has explained:

“His pictures are designed to deliver transcendence… to provide access to hidden but immanent truths of the universe—not merely to struggle with that transcendence, those truths (what would be a doubter’s way), but to actually convey them. For Rothko, in an interpretation that we can scarcely fathom now, a picture could offer immediate access to the divine.”
John Elderfield, “Transformations,” in Seeing Rothko, Los Angeles 2002, p. 101

Left: SEAGRAM MURALS AT THE TATE MODERN, 2008. IMAGE © TATE, LONDON / ART RESOURCE, NY. ART © 1998 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL & CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Right: ROTHKO CHAPEL, HOUSTON. ART © 1998 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL & CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Though captivating even upon first glance, the fullness of Rothko’s exquisite gift for crafting intricately developed compositions only reveals itself through prolonged contemplation of his canvases. Visible across the expansive surface of the present work is the remarkable power of Rothko’s brush, the full range of his formal repertoire – from broad, theatrical sweeps of pigment to feathery staccato wisps – evincing his painterly mastery. For instance, the hazy crepuscular gray of the lower region appears to billow softly into the wine-soaked passage above, like smoke drifting across a canyon, as Rothko’s brush leaves whisks of paint behind. While deeply saturated at their cores, the borders of each amorphous form commingle gently in vaporous whispers, allowing the transitions between tones to be absorbed with greater intimacy, increased sensitivity, and at slower rhythms. Indeed, it is the edges of these color fields that are most compelling in Rothko’s praxis. As early as 1958, the year of the present work, Dore Ashton identified these passages as the most significant area of Rothko’s work

“I would like to suggest that the… edges, the quavering areas of light, the completely ambiguous extremities of Rothko’s forms – present for the past five years – are the crucial carriers of Rothko’s complex expression.”
Dore Ashton, “Mark Rothko at Sidney Janis Gallery, 1958,” Arts & Architecture, vol. 75, April 1958

It is these edges in Untitled (Black on Maroon) that invite a deeper engagement, a more careful observation, allowing the viewer to fully appreciate the fluctuating depth, ethereal boundaries, and reverberating pull of pulsating color. In the presence of this commanding work, the viewer is drawn inward, toward an experience of exultation and solemnity, absence and presence, humanity and the divine. Measuring six feet in height, Untitled (Black on Maroon) was executed on a life-size, human scale, as a parallel to the scale of its emotive subject. For Rothko, who wanted viewers to stand close to his work in order to fully immerse their fields of vision, a painting’s size was crucial in successfully conveying the transcendental mood and solemn reverence he sought. As he explained in a 1951 symposium, he painted on a large scale “precisely because I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.” (The artist quoted in “A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture,” Interiors 10, May 1951, p. 104) Rothko’s enveloping compositions, metaphysically articulated through color, form, scale, and a sense of space, evinced the artist’s deep-rooted desire to communicate directly and viscerally the poetic grandeur of emotions we all share. Untitled (Black on Maroon) is amongst the finest manifestations of his great ambition: