The painter who returned a $35,000 commission
Rothko spent two years on a mural series for an elite restaurant — then walked away from the money the night he finally ate there.
In 1958 Mark Rothko accepted the biggest commission of his life: thirty-five thousand dollars to paint murals for the Four Seasons, the glittering new restaurant in Manhattan's Seagram Building. He worked for nearly two years, and the palette kept darkening — orange, then maroon, then a bruised black-red meant, he said privately, to make diners feel trapped in a room where the windows are bricked up.
Then he went and actually ate there. Watching the crowd move through the room he had designed to unsettle them, something in him snapped. That same night he called his studio and told an assistant he was returning every cent.
"Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine," he said.
He kept the thirty canvases in storage for a decade before finally giving nine of them to London's Tate, where the deal was: they hang together, permanently, in a room built for nothing else. The commission he refused became the room he got to keep.