Mark Rothko received the commission for the Seagram Murals in 1958 as what seemed to be the most commercially prestigious commission of his career: a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, the glass-and-bronze Mies van der Rohe tower that had just redefined the New York skyline. The commission from the architect Philip Johnson was lucrative, and Rothko accepted it. Then, according to his own account, he had dinner at the Four Seasons and understood what he had agreed to. He returned the advance and kept the paintings.
The paintings he kept - nine large canvases of deep maroon and black rectangles on dark grounds - eventually went to the Tate Modern in London, which Rothko gave to the gallery as a gift after visiting in 1969, a year before his death by suicide. He stipulated that they be exhibited together in a single room in near-darkness, the canvases hung at a height that would position them slightly above the viewer's eye level, as he had calibrated them in his studio. The effect was, and remains, overwhelming.
Rothko described the paintings as expressing 'tragedy, ecstasy, doom.' He was a secular Jew from a religious Latvian background, and his work throughout his mature period circled obsessively around questions that are at bottom theological: the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the experience of overwhelming presence, the silence that surrounds the most serious human questions. His reported statement that he wanted his paintings to induce in the viewer the feeling of standing in the Michelangelo Laurentian Library - a space of architectural compression that generates an almost physical anxiety - points toward the experiential category to which his work belongs: the sublime, or what theologians call the numinous.
Psalm 46:10 - 'Be still, and know that I am God' - is not a text Rothko would have cited, but it describes with precision the experience his paintings seek to generate. The imperative to stillness, the promise that stillness opens onto knowledge of God, the framing of that knowledge as an encounter with overwhelming power ('I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth' - Psalm 46:10) - these are the movements of attention that the Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern request from the viewer who stands before them in good faith.
The color - deep maroon, almost black, with dark rectangles that float within the darker field - creates a visual experience of tremendous weight and compressed energy. There is light in these paintings, but it is trapped, barely emergent from the darkness. The theological resonances are with 1 Kings 19:12 - the still small voice, the divine presence in the quiet after the wind and earthquake and fire - and with Habakkuk 2:20: 'The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.' The paintings ask for silence. They generate it.
Rothko's decision to give the paintings to the Tate rather than to a commercial venue was not incidental. He wanted them in a context of serious looking, protected from the casual consumption of restaurant art, presented to viewers who came specifically to encounter them. The Rothko Room at the Tate Modern, where they have been installed since 1970, is one of the most visited contemplative spaces in London - a room without religious imagery, without liturgy, without doctrine, that nonetheless generates something that many visitors describe in unmistakably religious terms: awe, silence, tears, the sense of being seen by something larger than themselves.
In the history of modern art's engagement with religious experience, the Seagram Murals occupy a unique position: abstract paintings that do not illustrate religious subjects but create the conditions for religious experience, that take the contemplative tradition's insistence on silence, stillness, and overwhelming presence and translate it into the medium of paint on canvas.