Black on Maroon
- Artist: Mark Rothko
- Date: 1958
- Medium: Oil paint and acrylic paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 2667 x 2413 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Black on Maroon” by Mark Rothko, painted in 1958. Rothko was asked to create murals for a private dining room in New York’s Seagram Building, so he built a scaffold in his studio that matched the restaurant’s scale. He wanted the canvases to speak to the scale of human feeling, to capture a kind of dramatic mood. The result is a big, unframed rectangle of deep maroon with a large block of black in the center, the edges feathered to blend into the maroon. Two narrow maroon bands inside the black hint at a window, giving a quiet, almost claustrophobic feel. Rothko’s palette shifted from bright reds to darker maroon, dark red and black, making the work more somber. After more than two years of work he withdrew from the commission, feeling the exclusive restaurant setting was unsuitable, and later gave the series to the Tate.
See it in person
Black on Maroon is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
