Mark Rothko

Sakura, Japan

This exhibition, organized in association with the Tate Modern, focused on Rothko’s late series, beginning with the 1958 commission of a sequence of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York. Rothko executed around thirty large-scale canvases for the project, of which seven would likely have been installed had he not abandoned the project in 1959. A decade later, Rothko gave nine of these murals to the Tate Gallery after extensive discussions with its director. Rothko reunited the Tate’s murals with seven other murals from the 1958 commission acquired by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. Several related works were on view, as was a maquette produced in 1969 for the Tate Gallery’s installation. In addition the exhibition included small graphite studies on black paper made in 1966 for the Rothko Chapel commission in Houston and earlier black canvases from 1964. A canvas from the important Black on Gray series of 1969–1970 completed the exhibition.