Mark Rothko: The Room | Episode 4

By the beginning of the 1960s, Mark Rothko was no longer thinking only about individual paintings. The wall mattered. The light mattered. The distance mattered. The room mattered. In this episode, we follow Rothko from the 1961 Whitechapel exhibition to the Harvard murals and finally to Houston, where the problem he had been working on for decades became architectural. At Whitechapel, Rothko tried to control the conditions under which his paintings were seen. At Harvard, the room itself altered the paintings as light slowly damaged their color — leading decades later to an extraordinary restoration method using projected light. And in Houston, painting and architecture moved toward one another until the result was no longer simply a group of canvases in a building. It was a Rothko room. But the deeper question remained the same one Rothko had been asking for years: How much can an artist control the encounter between a painting and another human being? The answer, eventually, may have been almost everything. Except the person who walked into the room. THE ROOM is Episode 4 of our five-part Mark Rothko documentary series. A Second Room Films production.