From the Panza Collection to a wall in Los Angeles

Unlike a nineteenth-century picture with a long, gossipy chain of dealers and scandals, No. 61 has a short and quiet life as an object: no famous first buyer, no auction-room drama, no renaming fight. It was painted in 1953, in New York, in the middle of Rothko’s most productive run of the stacked-rectangle pictures, and its history is mostly the history of one collection.

That collection belonged to Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo(1923–2010), a Milanese collector who, from the late 1950s onward, assembled one of the most important private holdings of postwar American art anywhere in Europe, Abstract Expressionism first, then Pop and Minimalism. “The Panza Collection” became a name in its own right. Panza bought across the New York School with real conviction at a time when much of Europe still wasn’t sure this work mattered, and the rust-and-blue Rothko was one of the pictures he held.

In 1984, the painting entered The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) as part of the museum’s acquisition of a large block of the Panza Collection. MOCA was then a brand-new institution (founded in 1979, its permanent Grand Avenue building not yet open), and the Panza purchase was the foundational coup that gave the young museum a serious permanent collection overnight. The canvas carries the credit line “The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection,” accession number 84.9, and it has been a MOCA picture ever since.

Because Rothko died in 1970, the painting is still under copyright; it is administered by the artist’s heirs, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, through the Artists Rights Society in New York. (That is why you will see it reproduced small and credited, here and elsewhere, rather than splashed full-bleed: it is a living copyright, not a public-domain image.)

Two things from his last decade say more about what he thought these pictures were than any statement does. In 1958 he took a commission to paint a cycle of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building in Manhattan, and then, after roughly two years of work and a dinner in the room, he handed the money back and withdrew the paintings, unable to stomach the idea of his work hanging as expensive decoration over the meals of the rich. (Nine of those murals became a quiet room of their own at the Tate in London.) The refusal is the clearest thing he ever did: if the paintings were only handsome color, there would have been nothing to refuse.

Rothko’s own end was bleak (he took his life in his New York studio in 1970, at the height of his fame) but the move he made in pictures like this one only grew. The claim that a field of color, with nothing in it, could carry the emotional weight that a depicted figure used to carry turned out to be one of the most consequential ideas in postwar painting. It runs straight through the stained fields of Frankenthaler and the soaked veils of Morris Louis, and it reaches its purest form in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, an octagonal, non-denominational room of fourteen of his darkest canvases that he was commissioned to design in 1964 and controlled down to the architecture, the scale, and the light, building not a wall of pictures but a single space to stand inside. He did not live to see it open: it was dedicated in 1971, a year after his death. People still enter it, sit, and weep, which was, by his own account, always the point.

And it is worth ending where the labels began, because the picture argues against them every time someone stands close to it. It is not, finally, a study in color relationships, however beautiful the rust against the blue happens to be. It is a tall, breathing field built to be felt before it is understood, one of the clearest cases anyone ever made that abstraction could be an emotional encounter and not just a formal one.