Blame It on Rothko
By Susan Kathryn Hefti
Special to The Clyde Fitch Report
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In his Oct. 2, 1959 review of what would become one of New York City’s most radiant, enduring symbols of the power luncheon, venerable New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne exalted the sublime delights of the Four Seasons’ herbed lobster parfait. He rhapsodized poetically over the succulent morsels of crustacea “enrobed in a devastatingly rich blend of whipped cream and hollandaise sauce.”
Claiborne’s frothy testimony no doubt helped light up the reservation lines at the nascent Midtown dining room. Adding to the buzz were the Four Seasons’ four-star architects: Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, in which the restaurant is located, one of the most celebrated archetypes of modernism, and the restaurant’s classic Philip Johnson interior, which today boasts an official designation as a New York City landmark. A pretty heady recipe for the global mythology that has long swirled about the Four Seasons.
Yet as potent as these individual ingredients were, none ever packed as powerful a punch as thrown by artist and cultural rebel Mark Rothko, who, as the current Broadway play Red explores, famously returned a $35,000 commission for what subsequently became known as the Seagram murals, paintings that were to hang on the Four Seasons’ walls but never did. Legend has it that after visiting the Four Seasons with his wife, Rothko was so put off by the restaurant’s gastronomic decadence and too-dear-by-half prices that he refused to deliver the commissioned paintings, donating eight of the 30 murals to the Tate Gallery in London. Later, the rest of the murals would be divvied up between Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C . . .
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