A landmark in the change was the Seagram murals commission which Rothko received in 1958, and which occupied him till 1960. He rejected his traditional format for the murals, opening, as it were, the central rectangles so that either one or two separate areas of the ground colour appear in the centre of the painting. A significant effect of this development was, as Clement Greenberg pointed out, to increase greatly the effect of drawing within the picture. The murals seem closer to figuration than anything else Rothko made after the late 1940s, as if they contained images of doors, gates or thresholds of some kind. This may partly be because of the large amount of drawn edge, drawing being the basis of representational art in the western tradition. It may also be connected with the pattern of the colouring, the plum ground colour alternating across the picture with the orange-red of the ‘doors’. The effect is to make one read the surface of the picture as a sequence, instead of, as usually with Rothko, taking the whole picture in at once; this adduces a literary interpretation. Seen as gates or doors, the shapes favour the tragic, Orphic, explanation that Rothko's paintings in general are often given. One could imagine, in particular, that the fiery red of the gates signifies the artist's daring in passing through, and the mute light-absorbent plum colour was an equivalent for Hades. But though Rothko was fascinated by tragedy, there is no evidence that at this time his mind worked through the figurative images of ancient myth. At best one can be reasonably certain that, in reading the pictures figuratively, one id identifying correctly their implications, even if in doing so one is reverting to the use of images after the artist had commanded them to be pulverized. The issue is not entirely confined to the Seagram murals because, though Rothko stopped using their format, he continued with their colours.

The importance of red for Rothko in the 1960s may have been connected with its flexibility, its ability to appear thrusting and fiery or sombre and melancholy. This contrast is felt in the Seagram murals, and though sombre colouring tends to dominate in the later paintings, one picture at the Hayward, Reds and Violet over Red of 1959, was almost entirely warm and expansive in character. Reds played a major role in all but one of the paintings in the Hayward between 1959 and 1968. To judge by the exhibition, his late paintings were much less varied in their colouring, and, in particular, the yellows which were common in the 1950s disappeared. Rothko liked to deny that he was a colourist, and the significance of the later pictures may be as much in the closeness of their colours and tones as in what the colours actually were. It is attractive, and perhaps partly true, to think of the earlier light-exuding pictures like No. 20, 1950 as optimistic, and the dark 1960s paintings as pessimistic, but the problem is certainly more complicated, as a dark red can be just as stimulating as a luminous yellow.