Red on Maroon
- Artist: Mark Rothko
- Date: 1959
- Medium: Oil paint, acrylic paint and glue on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 1829 x 4572 x 31 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is “Red on Maroon” by Mark Rothko. Painted in 1959 as part of the Seagram Building restaurant commission, it sits on a huge horizontally‑oriented canvas. The work is a bold field of colour: a deep maroon rectangle frames a smaller crimson‑red rectangle, giving the impression of a window caught in a solid wall. Rothko’s technique layers oil, acrylic and glue, then scrapes and blurs the edges so the colours bleed into each other, creating depth and movement. The palette here is much darker than his earlier bright canvases, a shift he made to match the somber mood he felt would fit an exclusive dining space. Though he eventually withdrew from the commission, feeling the restaurant was an inappropriate setting, the piece was presented to Tate in 1969. It remains a key example of Rothko’s colour‑field work and his exploration of human emotion through scale and hue.
See it in person
Red 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.
