Visitors to the penthouse at the Holyoke Center today will no longer find the elegant dining room designed for Harvard’s most lavish events, but instead a number of sun-bathed offices with the best views in Cambridge. The only traces to remind a visitor that this floor was the setting of one of the great tragedies of modern art are found in the Harvard chairs that decorate the offices. Though typical across the University, these particular chairs are distinguished by rubber bumpers affixed to their backs.

These so-called “Rothko-bumpers” immortalize the numerous well-intended but futile attempts made to safeguard five paintings given to the University by internationally renowned American Abstract-Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. His murals, designed to create a complete spatial experience for a viewer and ranking among the most valuable works of art owned by Harvard, ironically did so in a physical space that would eventually lead to damage and their removal.

Today, with the Holyoke space converted to offices, Rothko’s Harvard murals sit faded and damaged in an undisclosed location, wrapped in black plastic and rarely seen.

Rothko, known for large canvases that confront the viewer with the subtlety and depth of large fields of color, painted three mural cycles late in his career. The second of these was commissioned for the Holyoke Center penthouse, an idea initially based in a 1960 request by Harvard’s Society of Fellows. After the Society found they could not afford to rent the penthouse for their own use, Professor Wassily Leontief—who led the society and initially came up with the idea of approaching Rothko for the commission—and then-Fogg Art Museum director John Coolidge continued to advocate on behalf of the murals to the Harvard Corporation and then-University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28.

In a university known for decorating nearly every ceremonial space of any kind with portraits of founding fathers, patriarchs and presidents, it is surprising that a completely non-representational painter such as Rothko would receive approval from the Corporation for such a prominent display. On the other hand, Pusey had demonstrated his tolerance for modernism by giving university projects to Graduate School of Design Dean Josep Luis Sert, and by commissioning Le Corbusier to design the university’s new Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Despite some initial misgivings, by early 1962 the Corporation had agreed to the mural commission, and by October of that year Pusey had previewed the murals in Rothko’s studio and recommended their acceptance.

Rothko was well aware of the room for which his murals were painted. Indeed, he helped make the small changes, including fiberglass curtains and olive-green fabric wall covering, that would give the room the somber qualities in which he preferred his work to be seen. By contrast, the room’s north and south walls were lined with windows that illuminated the paintings—and ultimately served as their downfall.

Marjorie B. Cohn, who served until last week as acting director of the Harvard University Art Museums and who helped stretch the unrolled canvases when they first arrived in Cambridge in 1963, says Rothko knew about the full windows from the beginning. “There was no surprise,” she says.

Once the paintings were hung, Cohn says, museum conservators regularly had to visit the penthouse to make sure the curtains were closed. But even when they were, they still let in considerable amounts of sunlight.

And because the paintings belonged to the Corporation and not the University Art Museums, the measures that staff from the Fogg took to look after the paintings were conscientious—but not technically their responsibility. They could only do so much, Cohn says, and the paintings were often at the mercy of others.

By 1967, the deep crimson red of four of the five murals had faded to blue-purple at best, and in the case of Panel Five, nicknamed “the nude,” its flesh-colored abstract figure on a red background had become a white figure against a gray-blue ground.

Moreover, the room, which was to be an exclusive place for entertaining, could soon be used by any university entity. “The Rothkos were famous or notorious while they were up, in that people would go over to look at them all the time,” Cohn says.

In a room where people were eating, drinking and smoking on a regular basis, with little security, and with furniture that came up above the level of the paintings, the fading was inevitably accompanied by physical destruction: tears to two of the paintings, a food stain and even one instance of graffiti. Though conservators at the Fogg Museum were able to repair these blemishes, taking Panels Two and Three down in 1979 for repairs meant that only two paintings would remain in the penthouse, as Panel Four had come down in 1973.

Finally, in August 1979, all of the murals were brought to an off-site storage facility, never to be returned to the Holyoke Center.

The paintings have been shown three times since then, twice at the Sackler Museum and later in 2001 as part of an exhibition of Rothko’s murals at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. They have been in storage for longer than they were originally exhibited, and form a tragic event for both art history and the University’s legacy.