Mark Rothko

Four Darks in Red
1958

Four Darks in Red exemplifies Mark Rothko’s darker palette of the late 1950s, when he increasingly used red, maroon, and saturated black paints. Four dark rectangular areas of different proportions dominate the composition, simultaneously emerging from and receding into a luminous red ground. Rothko’s method of layering many coats of paint, along with the special reflective qualities of his color mixtures, gives his paintings an inimitable depth and incandescence. When this nearly ten-foot wide canvas is seen close up (as the artist intended), the viewer is engulfed in an atmosphere of color and intense visual sensations. The weightiest dark color is at the top of the canvas while a softer roseate glow emanates from below, creating a reversal of visual gravity. Rothko believed that such abstract perceptual forces had the ability to summon what he called “the basic emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.”

Not on view

Date
1958

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 101 13/16 × 116 3/8in. (258.6 × 295.6 cm)

Accession number
68.9

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz, Mrs. Samuel A. Seaver and Charles Simon

Rights and reproductions
©Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/897