Ten years ago, the name of Mark Rothko featured prominently in the news when his children brought suit against his executors—as it turned out, successfully—for defrauding the Rothko estate. Now a Rothko scandal is before us once again, thanks to an exhibition at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum entitled “Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals.”[1] What the Sackler has put on view is nothing less than the pitiful remnants of six mural-sized paintings that were given by Rothko to the university in 1965 and then left to molder in a roominadequately shielded from sunlight.
The paintings were allowed to fade so badly in the years after their installation that they soon bore only the most schematic relation to their original state, and were finally removed to storage in 1979. This exhibition, mounted under the auspices of Harvard’s Center for Conservation and Technical Studies and including Rothko’s painted sketches for the murals, does not showcase a restoration—the paintings were too far gone for that by the time of their removal—but documents the research into the causes of the deterioration. Once the exhibition closes in October, the paintings can never be placed on public view again, lest they deteriorate even more. Though one was prepared in some respects for the Sackler exhibition—the fate of Rothko’s Harvard murals has been an open secret for some time—it still came as a shock. For anyone who loves painting, the present condition of the murals makes for a wretched, sickening spectacle.
Rothko’s murals
