Harry Cooper ’81, curator of modern art at the Fogg Art Museum, says that the vertical motifs of the murals are “well-suited to the idea of a mural cycle because they really have so strong an architectural feeling of columns and posts and lintels.”

“They are a huge relief from the stacked rectangles, which I think got a little stale,” Cooper says.

Rothko’s first mural series was intended for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, which was designed by Philip Johnson ’30. The murals were never installed because of Rothko’s dislike for the restaurant’s elitism. In that series, vertical elements also appear, but without the nodes and articulations that give the Harvard murals a unique place in Rothko’s oeuvre.

Cooper points out that the motif of a frame within the actual frame creates a definite spatial experience, where the sheer size of the paintings can make the viewer feel as if he is entering the work. Rothko’s painting technique, which involves the layering of colors, also creates a sense of depth, as variations across the murals imply the presence of dimension.

Although this does not indicate that Rothko was careless about the colors he used—the studies for the murals located at the Mongan Center indicate that he was definitely concerned with the relationships between the colors in these paintings—they do represent a departure from his traditional forms. As such, these paintings remain significant to modern art despite the fading and damage they have sustained.

Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard University Art Museums and director of conservation at the Whitney Museum, points out that non-representational art like Rothko’s murals traditionally concerns itself “so much about color, when people see the colors changed they think the paintings have changed.”

But attributing this much significance to the shifts in color is a judgment of modern art that neglects the lessons we have learned from art of the past, says Mancusi-Ungaro. She contends that these faded Rothko murals should not be considered relics.

“Technically, they are very close to large watercolors…museums are constantly exhibiting watercolors that have faded and we still admire and appreciate them as watercolors,” Mancusi-Ungaro says.

Non-representationality makes it more difficult to fill in the blanks created by changes that inevitably occur to art, but Rothko’s Harvard murals continue to have meaning and power.

Mancusi-Ungaro also points out that “in 50 years, no work of art is going to be in its first youth…as works of art age, they change. People in the Harvard community remember these paintings as they looked new but [students] don’t.” Instead of thinking of paintings that are part of the present era as infallible, aging works of modern art should be considered in the same light as the fresco cycles of the aged Italian Renaissance that inspired Rothko to carry out his large commissions.

Understanding modern art in terms of the passage of time—rather than giving up on damaged work—means regarding these paintings with the same frame of mind as viewers look at art of the not-so-recent past. Mancusi-Ungaro predicts that “they will become more important as time goes on.”

Cohn, who has watched this narrative unfold and dealt with most of the parties involved, says that at this point assigning blame is really irrelevant.

“We shouldn’t sit around pointing fingers,” she says. “The University with the best will in the world and the artist with the best will in the world put the art in the wrong place.”

Cohn believes this has nothing to do with a misunderstanding or negative attitude towards modern art, nor with the negligence of any specific player. On Rothko’s part, Mancusi-Ungaro says, “if [he] had called a conservator when he was making these paintings in the early 1960s and said ‘I bought this red paint, is it okay to use?’ No one would have been able to tell him whether it would fade or not.”

The lack of materials standards at that time meant that Rothko could not have known Lithol Red was a “fugitive” pigment.