Mark Rothko: Seagram Murals July 23, 2012

In June 1958, Mark Rothko accepted a commission to decorate a dining room in the Four Seasons restaurant of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a new modernist skyscraper by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. In 1985 and 1986, the National Gallery of Art received a vast gift of works from the Mark Rothko Foundation, including several paintings deriving from the so-called Seagram Mural project. The installation of three of these in the Concourse galleries of the East Building is timed to coincide with the presentation of John Logan's play 'Red' at Arena Stage, which dramatizes Rothko's struggle with the commission.