DOCUMENTS REVEAL ROTHKO’S 1967 GIFT TO TATE

The Independent’s Arifa Akbar reports that an investigation into the Tate’s archives reveals that in 1967, Mark Rothko made a generous offer to the Tate Gallery of over thirty paintings, including work from his 1961 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and murals he made in 1958. The offer was not accepted because the Tate’s trustees feared that Rothko would expect to see them on permanent display.

Norman Reid, the Tate’s director at the time, eventually accepted nine of the thirty paintings by Rothko. The offer included pieces from his 1958 commission to create a series of mural paintings for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko pulled out of that project after he deemed the restaurant as “a place where the richest bastards of New York will come to feed and show off.” The nine works gifted to Tate led to the creation of the gallery’s “Rothko Room.” Rothko’s gift to the Tate arrived on the same day that he took his own life, February 25, 1970. A spokeswoman for the Tate said that the gallery had never “formally” turned down the offer of thirty paintings and that discussions had moved on to a more “focused” gift of nine paintings, which could be displayed in a dedicated room.