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did-you-knowRed

Did You Know?

  • Red is a play by American writer John Logan about artist Mark Rothko. First produced in London, the production was a limited engagement on Broadway for several months in 2010, earning the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Play, among five of seven Tony Award nominations.
  • The play won the 2010 Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Play and actor Alfred Molina won the Distinguished Performance Award.
  • Red won the 2010 Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Play, as well as three other Drama Desk Awards and three nominations.
  • Mark Rothko attended Yale on an academic scholarship and worked his way through college, but eventually dropped out after his second year. He did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree 46 years later.
  • In Rothko's early years, his paintings included dark, moody, expressionist interiors.
  • Rothko's work eventually matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated - or self-destructed - in his final works for the Rothko Chapel.
  • During World War II, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color.
  • Rothko's 1945 masterpiece, "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea" is an abstract painting sometimes interpreted as a meditation on Rothko's courtship of his second wife, Mary Ellen Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in the spring of 1945. The painting presents two humanlike forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colors, in subtle grays and browns.
  • In 1958, Rothko was awarded the first of two major mural commissions that proved both rewarding and frustrating. One was to provide paintings for a Park Avenue building's new luxury restaurant, The Four Seasons. Over the following three months, Rothko completed forty paintings, and felt increasing conflicted and challenged by the project.
  • Following a trip to Europe, Rothko visited the near-completed Four Seasons restaurant. Upset with the restaurant's dining atmosphere, which he considered inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko immediately refused to continue the project, and returned the commission cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company.
  • Rothko kept the commissioned paintings in storage until 1968, and the exact motives for his abrupt change of heart remain mysterious. Rothko never fully explained his conflicted emotions over the incident.
  • The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London's Tate Modern, Japan's Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.