Mark Rothko

Madrid, Spain

Mark Rothko was the first retrospective of the artist’s work to be held in Spain, and the presentation at Fundación Juan March marked the second stop of a traveling exhibition organized by the Tate Gallery, London. The show surveyed four decades of Rothko’s career but emphasized the 1950s, a period highlighted at this venue by eight of the nine Seagram Murals painted between 1958 and 1959 and presented to the Tate by the artist in 1969. (These canvases belong to a larger campaign of about thirty murals that Rothko produced on commission for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, a project he abandoned in 1959.) In Madrid, just five works on paper were included, as compared with fourteen shown at the Tate and eleven works on paper shown at the third venue in Cologne, Germany.