マーク・ロスコ

In 1958, Mark Rothko accepted the most expensive commission ever given to an abstract painter, $35,000 to decorate the dining room of the Four Seasons, a new luxury restaurant inside the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York. He worked on the murals for over a year, producing more than 30 large canvases in dark reds and blacks for a room built to seat the city's wealthiest diners. He told a studio assistant he wanted the paintings to make those diners feel trapped, as if in a room with the doors and windows bricked up.

In the summer of 1959 Rothko finally ate at the finished restaurant with his wife. He never delivered the murals. He returned the entire fee and kept the canvases in storage for the rest of his life, saying later that anyone who paid that much for a meal would never really look at a picture of his.

Rothko had spent the 1940s working through Surrealism and myth before arriving, by around 1949, at the large fields of soft-edged colour he's known for today, floating rectangles meant to be viewed up close, so the eye felt surrounded rather than simply looking in. Nine of the Seagram murals reached the Tate gallery in London on 25 February 1970, the same day Rothko was found dead in his New York studio.