Mister Jalopy says: "Immaculately written piece on Rothko's commissions for the Seagram Building only to cancel the contract and give them to the Tate. Profoundly effecting, this article has changed my life. A petty effort by a great artist to bite the hand that feeds only to realize it meant nothing. 'I have created a place' will change how I look at art forever. It is an undeniably unique – and sometimes unsettling – feeling to read a sentence and know you will remember it forever. "
Rothko's death changed everything. It transformed the meaning of his work, gave every encounter with his painting a terrible gravity. It fooled the cursory eye, putting Rothko's motivation so apparently on the surface, so visibly in the public domain, that it made it hard ever to think about him again with any subtlety.His death also ensured that a puzzle at the heart of his painting would never be solved. For Rothko's contract with society was not torn up that day in 1970, but a decade earlier, in 1959. That was when Rothko suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York – the most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter, a tremendously lucrative and enviable chance to take his work to new heights of ambition.
Link (via Things Magazine)
