Why Abstract Art Belongs in Living Spaces: Beyond Color Matching to Emotional Resonance
In 1958, Mark Rothko accepted one of the largest commissions of his career: a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant inside the newly built Seagram Building in New York. He worked on the paintings for months. Then he visited the finished restaurant, watched wealthy diners eating and making small talk under the ceiling he'd designed the room's mood around, and walked away from the commission entirely, returning the fee. According to the writer John Fischer, who recounted a conversation with him in a 1970 Harper's essay, Rothko said he had wanted to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room." The paintings eventually went to the Tate in London instead. Rothko had made, by any commercial measure, a color-coordinated set of large abstract paintings for a dining room. He considered that outcome a failure of the work's entire purpose. Why do we treat abstract art like wallpaper? The Seagram story mat...
